Lord Prestimion Read online

  “No doubt all you tell me about life in the Labyrinth is true,” Prestimion said, smiling. “I’m quite willing to wait forty years to find out, though.”

  Confalume looked pleased. His return to something approaching his old strength was neither a pretense nor an illusion, Prestimion realized. Confalume seemed rejuvenated, brimming with life, settling in for a long stay in his strange new home.

  He filled their wine-bowls with his own hand—for once, no oversolicitous servants were lurking about—and swung around in his seat to face Prestimion. “And you?” he said. “Not overwhelmed, are you, by all your new tasks?”

  “So far I hold my own, your majesty. Although it’s been a busy time.”

  “It must have been, yes. I hear so little from you. You leave me in the dark, you know, about all the affairs of the realm, and that’s not so good.”

  It was said very pleasantly, but there was no mistaking the implicit sting of the words.

  Prestimion’s reply was a cautious one. “I realize, sir, that I’ve been remiss in reporting to you. But there’s been a great many problems to take care of all at once, and I wanted to be able to come to you with some evidence of real progress to show.”

  “Problems such as what?” the Pontifex asked.

  “Dantirya Sambail, for one.”

  “The bloody Procurator, yes. But he’s all noise and no push, is that not so? What’s he been up to?”

  “Contemplating setting up a separate kingdom for himself in Zimroel, apparently”

  Confalume’s hand leaped as if of its own accord to the rohilla in his lapel and rubbed it in a counterclockwise way. He gave Prestimion an incredulous stare. “Are you serious? And is he? Where is he now? Why haven’t I been told of any of this?”

  Prestimion stirred uneasily in his seat. They were entering into perilous territory here. “I was waiting, sir, until I could interrogate the Procurator myself about his intentions. He was at the Castle for a time”—that was true enough—“but then he left, supposedly on a journey into the east country.”

  “Why would he go there?”

  “Who can know any reason for anything Dantirya Sambail does? At any rate, I gathered a small force and went out there after him.”

  “Yes,” said the Pontifex tartly. “So I understand. You might have informed me of that, too.”

  “Forgive me, sir. I’ve been remiss in many ways, I see. But I assumed your own officials would notify you of my departure from the Castle.”

  “As they did, yes.—Dantirya Sambail eluded you in the east-country, apparently.”

  “He’s in southern Alhanroel now, and intends, I assume, to take ship shortly for his homeland. When I leave here, I’ll be going down toward Aruachosia to try to seek him out.” Prestimion hesitated a moment. “The Grand Admiral has blockaded the ports.”

  Confalume’s eyes flashed surprise. “What you’re telling me, then, is that you regard the most powerful man in the world, other than yourself and me, as a dangerous threat to the integrity of the realm. Am I correct? That he has eluded your attempts to take him into custody. That he is currently a fugitive running hither and thither around Alhanroel as he seeks to get back overseas. What is it we have here, Prestimion, a civil war in the making? Over what? Why should the Procurator suddenly be talking about setting up an independent government? He’s been content with the present power-sharing arrangements all these years. Is it that he looks upon the new regime as weak, and feels safe in making his move? By the Divine, he won’t succeed at it!—You’re his kinsman, Prestimion. How can he dare think of launching an uprising against his own kin?”

  He already has launched one, Prestimion thought, which has been fought and settled at a terrible cost, and the world will never be the same for it. But it was impossible for him to speak of that in any way. And Confalume’s face had grown troublesomely red with rage.

  This topic had to be put quickly to rest.

  Calmly Prestimion said, “These rumors may all be overblown, sir. I need to find Dantirya Sambail and discover from him myself whether he feels that his present high position is insufficiently eminent. And if he does, I’ll convince him, I assure you, that he’s mistaken. But there’ll be no civil war.”

  The Pontifex appeared to be satisfied by that reply. He busied himself with his wine for a time; and then he began to question Prestimion quickly about other matters of state, moving with great efficiency from one subject to another, the rebuilding of the dam on the Iyann, the problem of inadequate harvests in places like Stymphinor and the valley of the Jhelum, the puzzling reports of outbreaks of insanity in many cities across the land. It was obvious that this man was no feeble and ill-informed recluse huddled away here in the dark recesses of the Labyrinth to wait out the final years of his life: plainly Confalume intended to be an active and dynamic Pontifex, very much the strong emperor to whom the Coronal would be the subordinate king, and even in the absence of detailed reports from Prestimion he had managed to keep abreast of much of what was taking place in the world. More, probably, Prestimion suspected, than he was bringing up for discussion now. It was common knowledge when Confalume was in his prime that underestimating him was a dangerous game to play; Prestimion knew that it would be rash to underestimate him even now.

  The meeting, which Prestimion had hoped would be brief and even perfunctory, proved to be a lengthy one. Prestimion replied to everything in great detail, but always choosing his words with extreme care. It was a tricky thing to tell Confalume how he proposed to go about solving the current spate of problems, when he could not allow himself even to reveal to Confalume any knowledge of why these problems happened to exist in their happy and harmonious world at all.

  The shattering of the Mavestoi Dam, for example. That had been the doing of Confalume’s own son Korsibar, at Dantirya Sambail’s suggestion: one of the most frightful calamities of the civil war. But how could he ever explain that to Confalume, who no longer knew even of Korsibar, let alone of the war? There was famine in places like the Jhelum Valley and Stymphinor because great battles had been fought there, thousands of soldiers quartered on the land, granaries emptied to feed them, whole plantations trampled underfoot. The battles were forgotten; the consequences remained. And the madness? Why, there was every likelihood that that was the result of the vast witchery called down upon the world by Heszmon Gorse and his crew of sorcerers at Prestimion’s own order! But any attempt to explain that would also entail speaking of the war, and of its bloody conclusion, and then of his decision—which now looked so reckless even to him—to blot the whole thing from the minds of billions of people.

  A deep longing arose in him to reveal the truth to Confalume here and now: to share the terrible burden, to throw himself on the older man’s mercy and wisdom. But that was a temptation he dared not yield to.

  He did have to give the Pontifex some sort of answers to his questions, or he would risk seeming incompetent in the eyes of the one who had nominated him for the throne. But there was so much that simply could not be spoken. All too often it seemed that he could respond to Confalume either by telling outright lies, which he most profoundly hoped to avoid doing, or else by revealing the unrevealable.

  Somehow though, by dint of half-truth and subterfuge, he succeeded in threading his way through the maze of the Pontifex’s queries without speaking of that which could not be told, and yet without resorting to any truly shameful deception. And Confalume appeared to accept what he had been told at face value.

  Prestimion hoped so, anyway. But he was much relieved when the meeting reached its apparent end and he could take his leave of the older man without further cause for uneasiness.

  “You won’t be so long in coming the next time, will you?” Confalume asked, rising, letting his hands rest on Prestimion’s shoulders, looking squarely into Prestimion’s eyes. “You know what pleasure it gives me to see you, my son.”

  Prestimion smiled at that phrase, and at the warmth of the Pontifex’s tone, though he felt
a sharp pang also.

  Confalume went on, “Yes, ‘my son,’ is what I said. I always wanted a son, but the Divine would never send me one. But now I have one—after a manner of speaking. For by law the Coronal is deemed the son-by-adoption, of course, of the Pontifex. And so you are my son, Prestimion. You are my son!”

  It was an uncomfortable, even painful moment. The Divine had sent Confalume a son, a fine noble-looking one at that. But he was Korsibar, who now had never been.

  Worse was to come.

  For then, even as Prestimion was edging uneasily toward the door, Confalume said, “You should marry, Prestimion. A Coronal needs a partner for his labors. Not that I did all that well myself with my Roxivail, but how was I to know how vain and shallow she was? You can manage it better. Surely there’s a woman somewhere who’d be a fitting consort for you.” And once again Thismet’s image blazed in Prestimion’s mind, and brought him the unfailing stab of agony that came with any thought of her.

  Thismet, yes. Confalume had never known of the late-blooming romance that had sprung up between Thismet and him on the battlefields of western Alhanroel.

  But what did that matter now? It would have been lawful for Prestimion to marry Confalume’s daughter, yes, despite the technicalities of the adoptive relationship. Only Confalume had no daughter. Her name itself had been canceled from the pages of history. Prestimion’s brief and swiftly extinguished alliance with Thismet was simply one thing more of which he could say nothing. Now there was Varaile; but she and he were still strangers. Prestimion had no way of knowing whether the promise of their early meetings would ever be fulfilled. He was oddly unwilling, besides, to mention Varaile at all to Confalume for another reason: out of some perverse and, he realized, wholly ridiculous fidelity to the memory of the murdered daughter of whose existence Confalume had no clue.

  So he smiled and said, “Surely there is, and may it be that I find her, some day. And if and when I do, I’ll marry her quickly, you can be sure of that. But let us say no more on that subject now, shall we, father?” And saluted and hastily took his leave.

  7

  Dekkeret had learned about Ni-moya when he was a boy at school, of course. But no geography lesson could possibly have prepared him for the reality of Zimroel’s greatest city.

  Who could believe, after all, that the other continent could have any city so grand? As far as Dekkeret knew, Zimroel was mainly an undeveloped land of forests and jungles and enormous rivers, with much of its central region given over to the impenetrable wilderness to which the aboriginal Metamorphs had been banished by Stiamot, and where they still had their largest concentration of population. Oh, there were some cities out there, too—Narabal and Pidruid and Piliplok and such—but Dekkeret imagined them to be muddy backwaters inhabited by hordes of coarse, ignorant yokels. As for Ni-moya, the continental capital, one heard impressive population figures, yes—fifteen million people were said to be living there, twenty million, whatever the number was. But many cities of Alhanroel had reached such proportions hundreds of years ago, so why get excited over the size of Ni-moya when Alaisor and Stee and half a dozen other cities of the older continent were at least as big, or bigger? In any event, population size itself was no guarantee of distinction. You could readily cram twenty million people into one area, or fifty million, if you cared to, and create nothing better than an enormous squalid urban mess, noisy and dirty and chaotic and close to intolerable for any civilized person who had to spend more than half a day in it. And that was what Dekkeret was expecting to find at his journey’s end.

  He and Akbalik had sailed from Alaisor, the usual port of embarkation for travelers bound to the western continent from central Alhanroel. After an uneventful but interminable-seeming sea journey they made their landfall at Piliplok on Zimroel’s eastern coast.

  Which proved to be a city that lived up in every way to Dekkeret’s expectations of it: he had heard that Piliplok was an ugly place, and ugly it was, brutal and rigid of design. People often said of his own native city of Normork that it was dreadfully dark and somber, a city that only someone born there could love. Dekkeret, who found Normork’s appearance quite pleasing, had never understood that criticism before. But he understood it now: for who could possibly love Piliplok except someone native to the place, to whom Piliplok’s brutal and rigid look was the norm of beauty?

  One thing that it wasn’t, though, was a muddy backwater. A backwater, maybe, but not at all muddy; Piliplok was paved, every last inch of it, a hideous metropolis of stone and concrete with barely a tree or a shrub to be seen. It was laid out with mathematical and indeed almost maniacal precision in eleven perfectly straight spokes radiating outward from its superb natural harbor on the Inner Sea, with curving bands of streets crossing the axis of the spokes in disagreeably exact rows. Each district—the mercantile quarter close to the waterfront, the industrial zone just beyond it, the various residential and recreational areas—was uniform throughout itself in architectural style, as though fixed by law, and the buildings themselves, clumsy and heavy, were not much to Dekkeret’s taste. Normork was an airy paradise by comparison.

  But their stay there was blessedly brief. Piliplok was not just the main harbor for the ships that sailed between Alhanroel and Zimroel, and for the fleet of sea-dragon hunters that plied the waters of the Inner Sea in quest of the gigantic marine mammals that were so widely prized for their meat. It was also the place where the River Zimr, the greatest of all Majipoor’s rivers, reached the sea after its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel; and so, by virtue of its position at the huge river’s mouth, Piliplok was the gateway to the whole interior of the continent.

  Akbalik bought passage for them aboard one of the big riverboats that plied the Zimr between Piliplok and the river’s source at the Dulorn Rift in northwestern Zimroel. The riverboat was enormous, far larger than the ship that had carried them across the Inner Sea; and whereas the oceangoing vessel had been simple and sturdy of design, intended as it was to bear up under the stresses involved in crossing thousands of miles of open sea, the riverboat was an ungainly and complicated affair, more like a floating village than a ship.

  What it was, actually, was a broad, squat, practically rectangular platform with cargo holds, steerage quarters, and dining halls belowdecks, a square central courtyard bordered by pavilions and shops and gaming pavilions at deck level, and, at the stern, an elaborate many-leveled superstructure where the passengers were housed. It was decorated in an ornate and fanciful way, a jagged scarlet arch over the bridge, grotesque green figureheads with painted yellow horns jutting out like battering-rams at the bow, and a bewildering abundance of eccentric ornamental woodwork, a whimsical host of interlacing joists and scrolls and struts sprouting on every surface.

  Dekkeret stared in wonder at his fellow passengers. The largest single group of them were humans, of course, but also there were great numbers of Hjorts and Skandars and Vroons, and a handful of Su-Suheris in diaphanous robes, and some scaly-skinned Ghayrogs, who were reptilian in general appearance although in fact they were mammals. He wondered if he would see Metamorphs too, and asked Akbalik about that; but no, Akbalik said, the Shapeshifter folk rarely left their inland reservation, even though the ancient prohibition against their traveling freely through the world had long since ceased to be firmly observed. And if there were any on board, he added, they would probably be wearing some form other than their own, to avoid the hostility that Metamorphs aroused whenever they mingled with other folk.

  The Zimr, at Piliplok, was dark with the silt it had scoured from its bed in the course of its long journey east, and where it met the sea the river was some seventy miles across, so that it hardly looked like a river at all, but rather like a gigantic lake beneath which a vast stretch of the coast lay drowned. Piliplok itself occupied a high promontory on the river’s southern bank; as they set out on their journey Dekkeret could just barely make out the uninhabited northern bank, plainly visible even across that great distance
because it was a massive white cliff of pure chalk, a mile high and many miles long, brilliant in the morning light. But soon, as the riverboat left Piliplok behind and began to make its way upriver, the Zimr narrowed somewhat and took on more a riverlike appearance, though it never became truly narrow.

  For Dekkeret this was like a journey to another world. He spent all his time on deck, staring out at the round-topped tawny hills and busy towns that flanked the river, places whose names he had never heard before—Port Saikforge, Stenwamp, Campilthorn, Vem. The density of population along this stretch of the river astonished him. The riverboat rarely traveled more than two or three hours before pulling into some new port to discharge passengers, pick up new ones, unload cargo crates, take new cargo on. For a time he jotted the names of them in a little notebook he carried—Dambemuir, Orgeliuse, Impemond, Haunfort Major, Salvamot, Obliorn Vale—until he realized that if he kept on writing down all these towns, there would be no room left in the book for anything else long before he reached Ni-moya. So he was content simply to stand by the rail and stare, drinking in the constantly changing sights. After a time they all blurred pleasantly together, the unfamiliar landscape started to look very familiar indeed, and he no longer felt such a sense of overwhelming strangeness. When dreams came to him in the night, though, they very often were dreams in which he was flying through the endless midnight of space, moving in utter ease from star to star.

  There were two disturbing events during the voyage, both of them occurring within a few days after the departure from Piliplok, one comic, the other tragic.

  The first involved a red-haired man just a few years older than Dekkeret, who seemed to spend much of his time wandering the decks muttering to himself, or chuckling unaccountably, or pointing at some spot in the empty air as if it held mysterious significance. A harmless lunatic, Dekkeret thought; and, remembering that other madman, not at all harmless, who had killed his beloved cousin Sithelle in the course of a crazed attempt to assassinate the Coronal, he made a point of keeping his distance from the man. But then, on the third day, as Dekkeret stood near the starboard rail looking out at the passing towns, he suddenly heard maniacal laughter coming from his left—or perhaps they were frantic shrieks; there was no way of telling—and looked about to see the red-haired man run wildly across the riverboat’s central concourse, arms flailing, and mount the steps that led to the upper decks, and stand for a moment at the edge of the observation portico up there, and then, uttering a cascade of grotesque giggles and cackles, hurl himself over the side and into the river, where he began to thrash about in a frantic, frenzied way.