Lord Prestimion Read online

  “A pity, if it is,” said Prestimion, idly fondling the thick smooth fabric. “The fur is very soft to the touch.—In here,” he went on, tapping a square bale bound in ornate seals, “here we have an offering from someplace in the south, strips of the highly fragrant bark of the very rare quinoncha tree. And this handsome cup is carved from the jade of Vyrongimond, which is so hard that it takes half a lifetime to polish a piece the size of your fist. And this—” Prestimion struggled with a half-opened crate out of which some shimmering marvel of silver and carnelian was protruding. It was as though by rummaging so frantically amongst these crates he might somehow pull himself out of the edgy, half-despondent mood that had driven him to this room in the first place.

  But he could not deceive Septach Melayn. Nor could Septach Melayn maintain his studied indifference to Prestimion’s earlier show of anguish any longer.

  “Prestimion?”

  “Yes?”

  The swordsman came a step or two nearer. He towered over Prestimion, for the Coronal was a compact man, strong-shouldered but short in the leg, and Septach Melayn was so slim and lengthy of limb that he seemed almost frail, though in fact he was not.

  Quietly he said, “You need not show me every one, my lord.”

  “I thought you were interested.”

  “I am, up to a point. But only up to a point.” In a tone that was quieter still, Septach Melayn said, “Prestimion, just why have you gone slinking away by yourself to this room just now? Surely not to gloat over your gifts. That’s never been your nature, to covet and fondle mere objects.”

  “They are very fine and curious objects,” said Prestimion staunchly.

  “No doubt they are. But you should be dressing for tonight’s feast now, not prowling around by yourself in this storehouse of strangenesses. And your peculiar words of a few minutes past—that cry of pain, that bitter lament. I tried to ignore it as some odd aberration of the moment, but it keeps echoing in my mind. What did all that mean? Were you sincere, crying out against the burden of the crown? I never thought to hear such things from your lips. You’re Coronal now, Prestimion! The summit of any man’s ambition. You will rule this world in glory. This should be the most splendid day of your life.”

  “It should be, yes.”

  “And yet—you withdraw to this dismal hall, you brood in solitude, you distract yourself with these silly pretty trinkets in your own great moment of attainment, you cry out against your own kingship as though it’s a curse someone has laid upon you—”

  “A passing mood.”

  “Then let it pass, Prestimion. Let it pass! This is a day of celebration! It’s not two hours since you stood before the Confalume Throne and put the starburst crown on your forehead, and now—now—if you could see your own face, now, my lord—that look of gloom, that bleak and tragic stare—”

  Prestimion offered Septach Melayn an exaggerated comic smile, all flashing teeth and bulging eyes.

  “Well? Is this better?”

  “Hardly. I am not in any way fooled, Prestimion. What can possibly distress you this way, on this day of days?” And, when Prestimion made no response: “Perhaps I know.”

  “How could you not?” And then, without giving Septach Melayn a chance to answer: “I’ve been thinking of the war, Septach Melayn. The war.”

  Septach Melayn seemed caught by surprise for an instant. But he made a quick recovery.

  “Ah. The war, yes. The war, of course, Prestimion. It marks us all. But the war’s over. And forgotten. No one in the world remembers the war but you and Gialaurys and I. All those who are gathered here at the Castle today for your coronation rites: they have no memory whatever of that other coronation that took place in these halls not so long ago.”

  “We remember, though. We three. The war will stay with us forever. The waste, the needlessness. The destruction. The deaths. So many of them. Svor. Kanteverel. My brother Taradath. Earl Kamba of Mazadone, my master in the art of the bow. Iram, Mandrykarn, Sibellor. And hundreds more, thousands, even.” He closed his eyes a moment, and turned his head away. “I regret them all, those deaths. Even the death of Korsibar, that poor deluded fool.”

  “You have left one name unspoken, and not a trivial one,” said Septach Melayn; and delicately he provided it, as if to lance an inflamed and swollen wound. “I mean that of his sister the Lady Thismet.”

  “Thismet, yes.”

  The name that could not be avoided, hard as Prestimion had tried. He could hardly bear to speak of her; but she was never absent long from his mind.

  “I know your pain,” said Septach Melayn softly. “I understand. Time will heal you, Prestimion.”

  “Will it? Can it?”

  They were both silent for a time. Prestimion let it be known by his eyes alone that he wished not to speak further of Thismet now, and so for the moment they spoke of nothing at all.

  “You know that I do rejoice in being Coronal,” said Prestimion finally, when the strain of not speaking out had grown too great. “Of course I do. It was my destiny to have the throne. It was what I was shaped by the Divine to be. But did there have to be so much bloodshed involved in my coming to power? Was any of it necessary? All that blood pollutes my very accession.”

  “Who knows what’s necessary and what is not, Prestimion? It happened, that’s all. The Divine intended it to happen, and it did, and we dealt with it, you and I and Gialaurys and Svor, and now the world is whole again. The war’s a buried thing. We saw to that ourselves. No one alive but us has any idea it ever took place. Why dredge it all up today, of all days?”

  “Out of guilt, perhaps, at coming to the throne over the bodies of so many fine men.”

  “Guilt? Guilt, Prestimion? What guilt can you mean? The war was all that idiot Korsibar’s fault! He rebelled against law and custom! He usurped the throne! How can you speak of guilt, when he alone—”

  “No. We must all have been at fault, somehow, to bring down a curse like that upon the world.”

  Septach Melayn’s pale-blue eyes went wide with surprise once again. “Such mystic nonsense you speak, Prestimion! Talking so seriously of curses, and allowing yourself to take even a scintilla of blame for the war on yourself? The Prestimion I knew in other days was a rational man. He’d never utter such blather even in jest. It would never enter his mind.—Listen to me. The war was Korsibar’s doing, my lord. Korsibar’s. Korsibar’s. His sin alone, his and no one else’s. And what’s done is done, and you are Majipoor’s new king, and all is well on Majipoor at last.”

  “Yes. So it is.” Prestimion smiled. “Forgive me this fit of sudden melancholy, old friend. You’ll see me in a happier frame of mind at the coronation feast tonight, I promise you that.” He walked up and down the room, lightly slapping at the sealed crates. “But for the moment, Septach Melayn—these gifts, this warehouse full of stuff—how it all oppresses me! These gifts weigh upon me like the weight of the world.” He said, with a grimace, “I ought to have it all taken out and burned!”

  “Prestimion—” said Septach Melayn warningly.

  “Yes. Forgive me again. I fall too easily into these lamentations today.”

  “Indeed you do, my lord.”

  “I should be grateful for these presents, I suppose, instead of being troubled by them. Well, let me see if I can find some amusement in them. I’m much in need of amusement right now, Septach Melayn.” Prestimion moved away and went rambling once more through the aisles of stacked-up boxes, pausing to peer into those that lay open. A fire orb, here. A sash of many colors, constantly shifting its hues. A flower fashioned from precious bronze, from whose petaled depths came a low humming song of great beauty. A bird carved from a vermilion stone, that moved its head from side to side and squawked at him indignantly. A scallop-edged cauldron of red jade, satin-smooth and warm to the touch. “Look,” said Prestimion, uncovering a scepter of sea-dragon bone, carved with infinite cunning. “From Piliplok, this is. See, here, how well they’ve encircled it with—”

&n
bsp; “You should come away from here now,” said Septach Melayn sharply. “These things will wait, Prestimion. You need to dress for the banquet.”

  Yes. That was so. It was wrong to sequester himself in here like this. Prestimion knew he must throw off the altogether uncharacteristic access of sadness and desolation that had overtaken him in these past few hours, rid himself of it like a cast-off cloak. He would have to show the banqueters this evening the radiant look of contentment and fulfillment that was proper and befitting to a newly crowned Coronal.

  Yes. Yes. And that he would do.

  2

  Prestimion and Septach Melayn went from the Hendighail Hall together. The two great burly Skandar guards on duty outside the storeroom offered Prestimion an excited flurry of starburst salutes, which he acknowledged with a nod and a wave. At a word from Prestimion Septach Melayn tossed a silver coin to each of them.

  But as they made their way through the innumerable drafty winding passages and corridors of the Castle’s northern wing, Prestimion found himself sliding back into bleakness. The task of regaining his poise was proving harder than he had expected. That dark shroud clung to him relentlessly.

  He should have risen to the Coronal’s throne without difficulties. He had been the unquestioned choice of his predecessor, Lord Confalume. It was understood by all that the crown would be his when the old Pontifex, Prankipin, died, and Lord Confalume moved on to the Labyrinth to take up Prankipin’s post of senior monarch. But when Prankipin did eventually die, it was Korsibar, Lord Confalume’s impressive-looking but slow-witted son, who had seized the royal power, at the urging of his pack of sinister companions and with the aid of an equally sinister magus. It was unlawful for a Coronal’s son to succeed his father on the throne, and so there had been civil war, from which Prestimion emerged in time in possession of his rightful crown.

  But such unnecessary destruction—so many lives lost—such a scar slashed across Majipoor’s long and peaceful history—

  Prestimion had healed that scar, so he hoped, by decreeing the radical act of obliteration by which a phalanx of sorcerers had wiped all recollection of the war from the minds of everyone in the world. Everyone, that was, other than he and his two surviving companions-at-arms, Gialaurys and Septach Melayn.

  But one scar would not heal, nor could he ever obliterate it. That was from the wound he had suffered at the climactic moment of the final battle. A wound to the heart, it was: the murder of the rebel Korsibar’s twin sister, the Lady Thismet, the great love of Prestimion’s life, at the hands of the sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon. No magic would bring Thismet back, and none would replace her in Prestimion’s affections. There was only a void where their love had been. What had it profited him to be made Coronal, if in the attaining of the throne he had lost the person who mattered most to him?

  Prestimion and Septach Melayn were at the entrance now to the courtyard that led to Lord Thraym’s Tower, where most Coronals of modern times had had their private apartments. Septach Melayn paused there and said, “Shall I leave you here, Prestimion? Or do you want me to remain with you while you prepare yourself for the banquet?”

  “You’ll need to change your outfit also, Septach Melayn. Go. I’ll be all right.”

  “Will you, now?”

  “I will. My word on that, Septach Melayn.”

  Prestimion went inside. The grand apartments that were his official residence now were mostly still bare. Lord Confalume, he who was Confalume Pontifex now, had shipped his incomparable collection of rarities and wonders off to his new residence in the depths of the Labyrinth. During the time of his usurpation Korsibar had furnished these rooms to his own taste—a host of highly ordinary things, some flashy and vulgar, some drab and common, all of them uninteresting—but the same act of sorcery that had wiped Korsibar’s illicit reign from the world’s memory had cleared away all of Korsibar’s possessions. Korsibar had never existed, now. He had been deleted retroactively from existence. In due time Prestimion would have some of his own things transferred to the Castle from his family estate at Muldemar, but he scarcely had had the opportunity yet for thinking about that, and he had little about him now except some furnishings brought over from the lesser apartment that he had occupied in former times in the Castle’s eastern wing, where high princes of the realm were allotted residential quarters.

  Nilgir Sumanand, the gray-bearded man who had long been Prestimion’s aide-de-camp, was waiting for him, fretting in obvious impatience. “The coronation banquet, lordship—”

  “Yes. Yes, I know. I’ll bathe quickly. As for what I’ll wear tonight, you probably already have it waiting, right? The green velvet banqueting robe, the golden stole, the starburst brooch that I wore this afternoon, and the lighter crown, not the big formal one.”

  “All is ready for you, my lord.”

  A ceremonial guard of high lords of the realm escorted him to the banquet hall. The two senior peers led the way—Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, the outgoing High Counsellor, and the immensely wealthy prince Serithorn of Samivole—and the pompous Prince Gonivaul of Bombifale, the Grand Admiral of Majipoor, marched just behind them. These three had thrown their considerable influence to Korsibar at the time of the civil war; but they no longer were aware of that, and Prestimion felt that it would be useful for him to forgive them for their disloyalty, now that it had been rendered null anyway, and treat them with the respect that was owing to men of their positions and power.

  Septach Melayn flanked Prestimion on his right and the hulking mountainous warrior Gialaurys was on his left. To the new Coronal’s rear walked his two surviving younger brothers, the hotheaded young Teotas and the tall, vehement Abrigant. The cunning and thoughtful third brother, Taradath, had perished in the war at the disastrous battle of the Iyann Valley, when Korsibar’s men had breached Mavestoi Dam and buried thousands of Prestimion’s troops under a wall of water.

  The coronation banquet, as ever, was being held in the Grand Festival Hall in the Tharamond wing of the Castle. That was a room bigger even than the Hendighail Hall, and much more centrally located; but even so huge a space as that was incapable of holding all the invited guests, the princes and dukes and counts of so many hundreds of cities, and the mayors of those cities as well, and the miscellaneous nobility of Castle Mount, descendants of scores of Coronals and Pontifexes of years gone by. But Lord Tharamond, one of the most cunning builders among the many Coronals who had left their imprint on the Castle, had so designed things that his great hall led to a chain of others, five, eight, ten lesser feasting-halls in a row, whose connecting doors could be opened to make a single linked chamber of truly Majipoorian size; and in these, room after room after room, the attendees of the coronation banquet were distributed according to carefully measured weightings of rank and protocol.

  Prestimion had little liking for such inflated events as these. He was a straightforward and unpretentious man, practical and efficient, with no special desire for self-aggrandizement. But he understood the proprieties very clearly. The world expected a great coronation festival from him; and so there would be one, the formal ceremony of crowning this afternoon, and now the great banquet, and tomorrow the speech to the assembled provincial governors, and the day after that the traditional coronation games, the jousting and the wrestling and the archery and all the rest of that. After which Prestimion’s coronation festival would end, and the heavy task of governing the giant world of Majipoor would begin.

  The banquet seemed to last ten thousand years.

  Prestimion greeted and embraced old Confalume and led him to his seat of honor at the dais. Confalume was still a sturdy and stalwart man even here in the eighth decade of his life, but much diminished in vigor and alertness from the heroic Confalume of old. He had lost both his son and his daughter in the civil war. Of course he had no notion of that, or even that Korsibar and Thismet had ever existed at all; but some sense of a vacancy in his spirit, an absence of something that should have been there, seemed evident in t
he often muddled expression of his eyes in these latter days.

  Did he ever suspect the truth? Prestimion wondered. Did any of them? Was there ever a moment when someone, be he a high lord of the realm or a humble farmer, stumbled by happenstance across some outcropping of the hidden reality that underlay the false memories implanted in his mind, and came up frowning in bewilderment? If so, no one gave any indication of it. And probably never would. But even if the sorcery that had altered the history of Majipoor might not hold true in every last case, it was the sort of thing that one would think wisest to keep concealed, Prestimion supposed, for fear of being thought a madman. He profoundly hoped so, at any rate.

  Another place of honor at the long dais went to Prestimion’s mother, the vivacious and sparkling Princess Therissa, who by virtue of her son’s ascent to the throne would soon herself assume the title of Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and take charge of the machinery by which guidance and solace were dispensed to the citizenry of Majipoor while they slept. Beside her on the dais sat the formidable Lady Kunigarda, Confalume’s sister, who had held the rank of Lady of the Isle during Confalume’s reign as Coronal, and now was about to retire from her duties. Then the various high lords of the Council, with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys among them. And at the end of the row were the high magus Gominik Halvor of Triggoin and his wizardly son Heszmon Gorse, smiling at him thoughtfully. Those smiles, he knew, indicated the claim they had on him: for, little as he cared for sorcery and the other esoteric phenomena, he could never deny that the skill at magicking that these two possessed had played no small part in his gaining of the throne.

  Prestimion went to each of these people in turn, formally welcoming them to this banquet that honored him.

  And then, after he had taken his own seat but before the food was served, it was the turn of the lesser but still major lords to make their obeisance to him—this great one and that, humbly coming up to offer their felicitations to Prestimion, their hopes for the era just dawning—