Lord Prestimion Read online

  “They are compensated by the Count, so I understand.”

  “We lost our own merchandise. Who will compensate us? Shall we apply to the Count?”

  “Perhaps you should,” said Simbilon Khayf, frowning a little, as though Prestimion’s sudden forcefulness of speech had indicated to him that he was not quite so humble a person as he had previously shown himself to be.—“Oh, I agree, my man, this can’t be allowed to go on much longer. So far no one has actually been drowned; but before long someone will, and then Fisiolo will tell the boy that it’s time to end this masquerade, and he’ll quietly be sent away for treatment somewhere, and things will get back to normal on the river.”

  “I pray they do,” said Septach Melayn.

  “For the time being,” Simbilon Khayf went on, “it would appear that we have a Coronal of our very own amongst us in Stee, and so be it, such as he is. As my daughter mentioned, many things are not right nowadays. The sad incident in our household here is evidence of that.” He rose from his little throne. The interview, quite clearly, was ending. “I regret the inconvenience you suffered on the river,” he said, though there was not a shred of regret in his tone. “If you will be so good as to return with a new model of your device, and make another appointment with my people, we’ll see about making an investment in your company. Good day, gentlemen.”

  “Shall I show them out, father?” Varaile asked.

  “Gawon Barl will do it,” said Simbilon Khayf, clapping for the servant who had brought him his chair.

  “Well, at least we have no conspiracy in this city to unseat me,” Prestimion said, when they were outside. “Only a wealthy lunatic whom Count Fisiolo unwisely indulges in his insanity. There’s some relief in knowing that, eh? We’ll send word to Fisiolo when we get back that these crazy voyages of young Karsp must come to an end. And all his talk of his being Lord Prestimion, as well.”

  “So much madness everywhere,” Septach Melayn murmured. “What can be going on?”

  “Did you notice,” said Gialaurys, “that we were here simply to ask for a loan, and very quickly he was talking of ‘making an investment’? If we actually had a company that produced anything worthwhile, I see, he’d have controlling ownership of it in short order. I think I understand more clearly now how he came by such great wealth so swiftly.”

  “Men of his sort are not famous for gentle business dealings,” said Prestimion.

  “Ah, but the daughter, the daughter!” said Septach Melayn. “Now, there’s gentility for you, my lord!”

  “You’re quite taken by her, are you?” Prestimion asked.

  “I? Yes, in an abstract way, for I respond to beauty and grace wherever I find it. But you know I feel little need for the company of women. It was you, I thought—you, Prestimion—who’d come away from there singing her praises the loudest.”

  “She is a very beautiful woman,” Prestimion agreed. “And marvelously well bred, for the child of such a boorish rogue. But I have other matters on my mind than the beauty of women just now, my friend. The Procurator’s trial, for one. The famines in the war-smitten districts. And also these strange incidents of madness cropping up again and again. This kinsman of Count Fisiolo’s, this other Lord Prestimion, who’s allowed to go free to terrorize the river! Who’s the bigger madman, I wonder, the boy who says he’s me, or Fisiolo who tolerates his lunacy?—Come. Let’s find a hostelry; and in the morning it’s on to Hoikmar, eh? We may discover three Prestimions holding court there!”

  “And a couple of Confalumes as well,” said Septach Melayn.

  From the window of her third-floor bedroom the daughter of Simbilon Khayf followed the three visitors with her eyes as they made their way across the cobbled plaza and into the public park beyond.

  There was something unusual about each of them, Varaile thought, that set them apart from most of the men who came here to get money from her father. The one who was so very tall and slender, whose movements were as graceful as a dancer’s: he spoke like a bumpkin, but it was plainly only a pretense. In reality he was sharp and quick, that one—you could see it in that piercing blue stare of his, which took in everything at a glance and filed it away for future use. And sly and cunning too; there was a note of mockery underlying everything he said, however straightforward it was meant to seem on the surface—a shrewd and playful and perhaps very dangerous man. And the second one, the big man who had said very little, but spoke with that thick Zimroel accent when he did: how strong he seemed, what a sense of tremendous power under tight restraint he showed! He was like a great rock.

  And then, that third man, the short broad-shouldered one. How compelling his eyes were! How magnificent his face, though the oddly inappropriate beard and mustache did him no credit. I suspect he would be quite beautiful without them, though, Varaile thought. He is a splendid man. There is a lordly presence about him. It is hard for me to believe that such a man is merely a dreary merchant, a grubby manufacturer of accounting devices. He seems so much more than that. So very much more.

  11

  They went up the Mount to the ring of Guardian Cities, with Hoikmar as their first stop. There, in a public garden abloom with tanigales and crimson eldirons, alongside a quiet canal bordered by short red-tinged grass soft as thanga fur, they encountered a beggar, a ragged and tattered old gray-haired man, who gripped Prestimion’s wrist with one hand and that of Septach Melayn with the other and said with a strange urgency in his voice, “My lords, my lords, give me a moment’s heed. I have a box of money for sale at a good price. A very good price indeed.”

  His eyes were bright with a look of great intensity and even, perhaps, keen intelligence. And yet he wore a beggar’s foul rags, torn and stinking. An old pale-red scar crossed the entirety of his left cheek and vanished near the corner of his mouth. Septach Melayn glanced across the top of the man’s head to Prestimion and smiled crookedly as though to say, Here we have another sorry madman, I think, and Prestimion, distressed by the thought, nodded solemnly.

  “A box of money for sale?” he said. “What can you mean by that?”

  The old man meant just that, apparently. He brought forth from a shabby cloth bag at his waist a rusted strongbox, much encrusted with soil and bound with sturdy straps of faded crumbling leather. Which he opened to reveal that the box was packed to its brim with coins of high denomination, dozens of them, royals and five-royal pieces and a few tens. He dug his gnarled fingers into the horde and stirred the coins about, making a silvery chinking sound. “How pretty they are! And they are yours, my lords, at whatever price you care to pay.”

  “Look,” Septach Melayn said, scooping up one silver piece and tapping it with his fingernail. “Do you see this lettering of antique style at the edge? This is Lord Arioc here, whose Pontifex was Dizimaule.”

  “But they lived three thousand years ago!” Prestimion exclaimed.

  “Somewhat more than that, I think. And who is this? Lord Vildivar, I believe it says. With Thraym’s face on the other side.”

  “And here,” said Gialaurys, reaching past Prestimion to pull a coin out of the box, and puzzling over the inscription on it. “This is Lord Siminave. Do you know of a Siminave?”

  “He was Calintane’s Coronal, I think,” said Prestimion. He looked sternly at the old man. “There’s a fortune in this box! Five hundred royals, at the least! Why would you sell this money to us for a quick price? You could simply spend the coins one by one and live like a prince for the rest of your life!”

  “Ah, my lord, who would believe that a man like me could have amassed a treasure like this? They’d call me a thief, and lock me away forever. And this is very ancient money, too. Even I can see that, though I can’t read; for these are strange faces, these Coronals and Pontifexes here. People would be suspicious of money this old. They’d refuse it, not knowing the faces of these kings. No. No. I found the box by a canal, where the rain had washed away the soil. Someone buried it long ago for safe keeping, I suppose, and never returned for it. But
it does me no good, my lords, to have such money as this.” The old man grinned slyly, showing a few snaggled teeth. “Give me—ah, let us say two hundred crowns, in money I can spend—give it me in ten-crown pieces, or even smaller coins—and the box is yours to deal with as you wish. For I see that you three are men of consequence, my lords, and will know how to dispose of money of this sort.”

  “Is a babbling old moon-calf,” said Gialaurys, tossing his coin back in the box and tapping his forefinger to his forehead. “No one would refuse good silver royals, however old they be.” And Septach Melayn nodded and smiled and twirled his forefinger in a little circle.

  With which opinion Prestimion found himself in agreement. He felt pity for the dirty, bedraggled old man. That burning brightness in his gaze was insanity, not intelligence. Surely this was one more dismaying instance of the strange madness that seemed to be polluting the world. He might indeed be a thief, yes, who had taken these coins from some collector of antiquities. Or, what was more likely from the looks of the box that held them, he really had found them beside the canal. But either way it was a madman’s act to be offering them so cheaply, the merest fraction of their true value, to strangers met by happenstance.

  Nor did Prestimion want any entanglement in these dealings. How could he, of all people in the world, be party to a transaction by which he bought hundreds of royals’ worth of silver from a beggar for a double handful of crowns? He felt a touch of horror at standing this close to madness. Longing profoundly to be gone from this place, he told Septach Melayn to give the man fifty crowns and let him keep the treasure for some other buyer.

  The beggar looked astonished as Septach Melayn counted out five ten-crown pieces and passed them across. But he took the money and tucked it in a belt beneath his robe. Then his crafty eyes widened and an expression that might have been fear flashed across his face. “Ah, but one must ever give value for money.” He snatched three coins from his own horde. Seizing Prestimion once more by the wrist, the old man pressed them into the palm of his hand, and went scurrying rapidly away, clutching his box of coins to his bony bosom.

  “What a strange business,” Prestimion said. The sour aroma of the old lunatic’s tattered garments lingered after him. He poked gingerly at the ancient coins with his fingertip, turning them from side to side. “They’re odd-looking old things, aren’t they? Kanaba and Lord Sirruth, I think we have here, and Guadeloom and Lord Calintane, and this one—no, I can’t make these names out at all. Well, no matter. Here, take care of these for me,” he said, giving them to Septach Melayn. They moved along.—“Two hundred crowns for the whole box?” Prestimion said, after a time. “He could have asked twenty times as much. A fool, do you think, or a thief, or a madman?”

  “Why not all three?” said Septach Melayn.

  Putting the episode from their minds, they spent two days more in languid Hoikmar, drifting about the taverns and markets of that serene lakeside city. Two other troublesome incidents disturbed the tranquility of the visit. A lanky raddled-looking woman with utterly vacant eyes drifted up to Septach Melayn in the main avenue and draped a costly stole of scarlet gebrax hide around his shoulders, murmuring that the Pontifex had instructed her to give it to him. Upon saying which, she turned instantly and lost herself in the busy traffic of the street. And a little later that day, while they were buying a meal of grilled sausages from a Liiman in the city plaza, a well-dressed man of middle years quietly waiting on line behind them, a man who might have been a university professor or the proprietor of a prosperous jewelry boutique, suddenly cried out in a wild voice that the Liiman was selling poisoned meat. Shouldering his way forward, he up-ended the cart onto the pavement, sending hot coals and skewers of half-cooked sausages spraying everywhere about, and went marching furiously away growling to himself.

  These were disquieting things. Prestimion’s purpose of going out with his companions in disguise had been to see at first hand the other side of Majipoor life, something other than that of the Castle and its gilded lords. But he had not anticipated so much darkness and strangeness, such a welter of irrational behavior.

  Had it always been this way out in the cities? he wondered—open displays of madness, public manifestations of the bizarre? Or, as Septach Melayn had some time ago suggested, was all this some sort of aftereffect of the obliteration of the memory of the war upon the minds of the most sensitive and vulnerable citizens? Either way the thought was distasteful. But Prestimion felt particular alarm at the possibility that he himself, by his desire to cleanse in an instant way the wound that the Korsibar insurrection had inflicted on the world, was responsible for this entire epidemic of madness, this strange plague of mental derangement, that appeared to be increasing in virulence from one week to the next.

  In Minimool, Hoikmar’s neighbor in the Guardian Cities, further signs of such things made themselves manifest. Prestimion found two days there more than sufficient for him.

  He had heard that Minimool was a place of distinctive and arresting appearance, but in his present mood he found it oppressively strange: a huddled-together city made up of clumps of tall narrow buildings with white walls and black roofs and tiny windows, crowded one up against another like so many bundles of spears. Steep vertiginous streets that were little more than alleyways separated one clump from the next. And here, too, he heard weird shrill laughter out of open windows high overhead, and saw more than a few people walking in the streets with fixed expressions and glassy eyes, and collided in a doorway with someone in a frantic hurry who burst into gulping breathless sobs as she went sprinting frenetically away.

  His sleep was punctuated by troubled dreams as well. In one the beggar with the coin-box from Hoikmar came to him, grinning his evil snaggle-toothed grin, and opened the box and showered him with coins, hundreds of them, thousands, until he was half buried beneath their weight. Prestimion woke, trembling and sweating; but later he slept again, and another dream came, and this time he stood at the edge of a lovely pearly-hued lake at sunrise with Thismet, quietly admiring a sky suffused with pink and emerald streaks, and Simbilon Khayf’s dark-haired daughter came up to them out of nowhere and swiftly thrust the silent unresisting Thismet into the water, where she vanished without a trace. This time Prestimion cried out harshly as he awakened, and Septach Melayn, lying on a nearby cot in the hostelry where they were spending the night, reached across and gripped him by the forearm until he was calm.

  There was no more sleep for him that night in Minimool. From time to time strange tremors of distress came over him, and for a moment, just before dawn, it seemed to him almost as though the general madness were reaching up and engulfing him with its dread contagion. Then he brushed the feeling aside. It would not touch him, whatever it might be. But O! The people! The world!

  “I have had enough of this tour, I think,” Prestimion said in the morning. “Today we return to the Castle.”

  Plainly much was amiss out there in the world of everyday life; and Prestimion, once he was back, gave orders for the planning for his official visit to the cities of the Mount to be accelerated. No more skulking around in false whiskers and shabby costumes, not now. In the full panoply of the Coronal Lord he would go forth to six or seven of the most important cities among the Fifty, and confer with dukes and counts and mayors, and take the measure of the crisis that seemed to be enveloping the world with such rapidity here in the opening months of his reign.

  First, though, the problem of Dantirya Sambail’s continued captivity needed a resolution of some sort.

  He paid a call on the magus Maundigand-Klimd, who by now had established his headquarters in a group of vacant rooms on the far side of the Pinitor Court that had been the apartment of Korsibar before his seizure of the throne. Prestimion had expected to find the place filled by this time with all the arcane gear of the sorcerer’s trade, astrological charts on the walls, and heaps of mysterious leather-bound folios full of magical lore, and enigmatic mechanical instruments of the sort he had seen
in the chambers of Gominik Halvor, the master of wizardry with whom he had studied the dark arts during his time in Triggoin: phalangaria and ambivials, hexaphores and ammatepilas, armillary spheres and astrolabes and alembics, and all of that.

  But there were none of those things here. Prestimion saw just a few small unimportant-looking devices laid out in indifferent order on the upper shelves of a simple unpainted bookcase that was otherwise empty. Their nature was unknown to him; they might easily have been calculating machines or other items of prosaic arithmetical function, not very different from those that Prestimion had pretended to deal in when he was in Stee. Or the cheap little geomantic devices that he had seen for sale in the midnight market of Bombifale, that night when he first had met Maundigand-Klimd, and which the Su-Suheris had scornfully dismissed as fraudulent and worthless. Maundigand-Klimd was not likely to have such things here, Prestimion decided. He was surprised by such sparseness, though.

  Maundigand-Klimd had furnished the apartment only in the most stark and minimal way. In the main room Prestimion saw a sleeping-harness of the sort used by the Su-Suheris folk, and a couple of chairs for the benefit of human visitors, and a small table on which a handful of books and leaflets of little apparent significance lay casually strewn. There seemed to be little, if anything, in the rooms beyond, and throughout the place the ancient stone walls were altogether bare of ornament. The effect was sterile and chilling.

  “This was a troubled trip for you, I think,” the magus said at once.

  “You can see that, can you?”

  “One scarcely needs to be a master of the mantic arts to see that, your lordship.”

  Prestimion smiled grimly. “It’s that apparent? Yes. I suppose it is. I saw things I’d rather not have seen, and dreamed things I’d have been better off not dreaming. It’s exactly as I was told: there’s madness out there, Maundigand-Klimd. Much more of it than I had supposed there to be.”