Lord Prestimion Read online

  The room now was utterly filled with the sounds of trumpets, bells, gongs. Givilan-Klostrin had come to a halt by the window, and stood there now, leaning forward, breathing heavily, his whole body shaking convulsively. He rocked from side to side, again and again lifting one foot and carefully putting it down, then lifting the other. His heads shot outward on their shared neck, moved rapidly inward until they seemed almost to strike each other, shot outward again. His cheeks were puffed; his tongues were outthrust; he made frightful blowing noises. Then he opened his eyes a moment. They were rolling wildly in their sockets.

  One minute, two, three, five: it went on and on. The rhythm was building toward a tension that could only end in some awesome eruption. But would this terrifying seizure ever end?

  Suddenly there was a startling silence in the room as all five metal spheres ceased their noisemaking at the same instant. Givilan-Klostrin seemed deep in trance.

  His shaking and rocking and foot-lifting all had ceased. Now he stood statue-still, utterly frozen in place, the right head dangling limply as though its neck-stalk were broken and the left one staring unblinkingly forward at Akbalik. The stasis held for a minute or more. Then from the drooping right head there began to come a low moaning wordless sound, a kind of rumbling whine that wandered up and down over five or six octaves, gradually cohering into a series of unaccented syllabic phrases as unintelligible to Akbalik as the coded lines on the cargo manifest.

  After a moment the upright left head began to speak as well: slowly declaiming a translation, apparently, of the oracular sounds coming from the other one, everything uttered clearly and precisely and understandably:

  “The man whom you seek,” said the left head of Givilan-Klostrin, “is here in this very province. These are messages from his hidden camp in the southern part of the province of Stoien to his companions in another land. He has spent many months gathering an army in a far-off place; he will soon bring his forces together here; it is his desire to overthrow the king of the world.”

  As he uttered the last of those words the Su-Suheris fell forward in exhaustion, collapsing with a tremendous crash almost at Akbalik’s feet. For a long moment he lay face down, trembling. Then he lifted each of his heads in turn and stared at Akbalik in a dazed, groggy way, as if uncertain of where he was or who the man might be that was standing before him.

  “Is it over?” Akbalik asked.

  The Su-Suheris nodded feebly.

  “Good.” Akbalik made a brusque chopping gesture with one hand held sideways. “You will forget everything that was spoken here today.”

  A look of bafflement appeared on both of Givilan-Klostrin’s icy-hued faces. In a weak voice the left head said, “Was anything spoken? By whom? I remember nothing, my lord. Nothing. The house of Thungma is empty.”

  “This is true,” the Vroon murmured. “They carry no memories away from their trances. As I explained, they are vehicles, merely, for whatever the demon chooses to reveal.”

  “I hope that’s really so,” Akbalik said. “Get him out of here as fast as you can.” He felt shaken and weak himself, as if it were he and not the Su-Suheris who had just been through the spasms and convulsions of that eerie seizure. His head ached from the unrelenting sound of those gongs and trumpets. And the slow, precise, stunning words of the oracle reverberated ceaselessly in his mind: The man whom you seek is here. He has spent many months gathering an army in a far-off place. It is his desire to overthrow the king of the world.

  The usual route from Castle Mount to the port of Alaisor on Alhanroel’s western coast was by river: downslope by floater by way of Khresm and Rennosk to Gimkandale, where the River Uivendak had its source, and then by riverboat down the Uivendak past the Slope Cities of Stipool and Furible and the foothills of the Mount via Estotilaup and Vilimong into the great central plain of the continent. The Uivendak, which after a thousand miles changed its name to the Clairn, and a thousand miles farther on became the Haksim, eventually was joined by the potent Iyann, which came flowing down out of the moist green country northwest of the Valmambra Desert and met the Haksim at a place known as Three Rivers, though no one knew why, since there were only two rivers there. From there to the coast the united rivers took the name of the Iyann.

  That final stretch of the Iyann had once been famous for its sluggishness, and travelers heading westward on it had needed to resign themselves to an unhurried final leg of their journeys; but since the breaking of the Mavestoi Dam upriver from the joining with the Haksim the waters of the western Iyann were far more vigorous than they had been in previous centuries, and the riverboat that carried Prestimion and Varaile moved along toward Alaisor at a speed that Prestimion would have found more heartening if it did not constantly remind him of the infamous tragedy of the breaking of the dam.

  Now they were just a few days’ journey from the coast, passing swiftly through warm, green, fertile agricultural lands whose inhabitants lined the shore, waving and cheering, shouting his name and sometimes Varaile’s also, as the Coronal’s ship went by. Prestimion and Varaile stood side by side at the rail, acknowledging the greeting with waves of their own.

  Varaile seemed amazed by the strength and depth of the outpouring of affection that came from them. “Listen to it, Prestimion! Listen! You can practically feel their love for you!”

  “For the office of the Coronal, you mean. It has nothing much to do with me in particular. They haven’t had time to learn anything more about me than that Lord Confalume picked me to succeed him, and therefore I must be all right.”

  “There’s more to it than that, I think. It’s that there’s a new Coronal, after all those years of Confalume. Everybody loved and admired Lord Confalume, yes, but he’d been there so long that everyone had come to take him for granted, the way you would the sun or the moons. Now there’s a new man at the Castle, and they see him as the voice of youth, the hope of the future, someone fresh and full of vitality who’ll build on Lord Confalume’s achievements and lead Majipoor into a glorious new era.”

  “Let’s hope they’re right,” said Prestimion.

  They were silent for a time after that, looking out toward the west, where the golden-green sphere of the sun had begun to slip toward the horizon. The land was flat, here, and the river very wide. Fewer people could be seen along the shore.

  Then Varaile said, “Tell me something, Prestimion. Is it possible under the law for a Coronal’s son ever to become Coronal after him?”

  The question astounded him. “What? What are you talking about, Varaile?” he said sharply, whirling about to face her with such a furious glare in his eyes that she backed away, looking a little frightened.

  “Why, nothing! I was only wondering—”

  “Well, don’t. It can never happen. Never has, never will! We have an appointive monarchy on Majipoor, not a hereditary one. I could show you historical records going back thousands of years to prove it.”

  “You don’t need to do that. I believe you.” She still looked alarmed at the vehemence of his reaction. “But why do you seem so angry, Prestimion? I was simply asking a question.”

  “A very strange one, I have to say.”

  “Is it? I didn’t grow up at the Castle, you know. I’m not an expert on constitutional law. I do know that the new Coronal usually isn’t the son of the one before. But then I found myself wondering, well, what if—”

  The question, Prestimion realized, had been entirely innocent. She had no way of knowing of Korsibar and his ill-fated revolt. He tried to calm himself. She had found him off his guard, that was all, seeming to probe into a sensitive, even a forbidden, area but in fact meaning nothing of the kind.

  “Well,” she said, “if he can’t be Coronal—and not Prince of Muldemar either, I guess, because Abrigant’s bound to have children of his own some day and they’ll inherit that title—well, then, maybe he can be a prince of something else, I suppose.”

  “He?” Prestimion was completely bewildered now.

 
“Oh, yes,” Varaile said, patting her stomach. “Definitely a he, Prestimion. I knew that weeks ago. But I had Maundigand-Klimd do a divination, all the same, and he confirmed it.”

  He stared. Suddenly this all made sense.

  “Varaile?”

  “You look so amazed, Prestimion! As if it’s never happened before in the history of the world.”

  “Not to me, it hasn’t. But that’s not the thing, Varaile. You told Maundigand-Klimd about it weeks ago, and not me? And told Septach Melayn too, I suppose, and Gialaurys, and Nilgir Sumanand, and your ladies-in-waiting, and the Skandar who sweeps the courtyard in front of—”

  “Stop it, Prestimion! You mean you hadn’t figured it out?”

  He shook his head. “It never occurred to me at all.”

  “I think that you really ought to pay closer attention, then.”

  “And you ought not to wait so long before telling me important news like this.”

  “I waited until now,” she said, “because Maundigand-Klimd told me to. He cast my horoscope and said that it would be more auspicious for the child if I mentioned nothing about him to you until we were west of the ninetieth meridian. We are west of the ninetieth meridian, aren’t we, Prestimion? He said it was where the land flattened out and the river got very wide.”

  “I’m not the captain of the ship, Varaile. I haven’t really been keeping track of the latitude.”

  “I was speaking of longitude, I believe.”

  “Latitude—longitude—what difference does it make?” Were they really past the ninetieth meridian yet? he wondered. Probably so. But either way what difference did it make, eightieth meridian, ninetieth, two hundredth? She should have told him long ago. But it seemed to be his destiny, he thought, to find himself entangled with some sort of wizardry at every turn. His head was throbbing with anger. “Sorcerers! Mages! They’re the ones who rule this world, not me! It’s outrageous, Varaile, completely outrageous, that this information has been circulating all over the Castle for weeks, and it’s been kept from me all this time simply because—because some magus happened to tell you—” He was practically sputtering with indignation. She was looking at him, wide-eyed with amazement. A smile crossed her face, and gave way to a giggle.

  Then Prestimion began to laugh as well. He was being very foolish, he knew. “Oh, Varaile—Varaile—oh, I love you so much, Varaile!” He slipped his arms around her and drew her close against him. After a long while he released her, and smiled, and kissed the tip of her nose.—“And no, Varaile, no, he can’t possibly become Coronal after me, and don’t ever even think about such an idea. Is that understood?”

  “I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said.

  6

  At any other time it would have been appropriate for Prestimion to spend at least a week at Alaisor. As Coronal, he certainly would have to be guest of honor at a banquet with Lord Mayor Hilgimuir in the famous Hall of Topaz and make the obligatory visit to the celebrated temple of the Lady on Alaisor Heights. And if he still had been only Prince of Muldemar, there would be a meeting with the great wine-shippers with whom his family had had commercial connections for so many generations; and so on.

  But these were not ordinary times. He had to get quickly to the Isle. And so, although he would meet with the lord mayor, it would be only for an hour or two. He would skip the visit to the hilltop temple, since he would be seeing the Lady herself soon enough. As for the wine-merchants, they were irrelevant now that he was Coronal and no longer could be concerned with the family wine business. A single night in Alaisor was all that he could allow himself, and then they would be on their way.

  The lord mayor had provided Prestimion and Varaile with the sumptuous four-level penthouse suite reserved exclusively for Powers of the Realm atop the thirty-story tower of the Alaisor Mercantile Exchange. All of Alaisor could be seen from its windows. Maundigand-Klimd and the rest of the Coronal’s entourage had been given lesser but still quite luxurious quarters nearby.

  It was a city of high imperial grandeur, the greatest metropolitan center of the western coast. A line of massive towering cliffs of black granite ran parallel to the shore here. The Iyann had carved a deep canyon through that wall of black cliffs long ago in order to reach the sea; and Alaisor lay outspread like a giant fan at their base, spreading far along the shore to north and south, with the bay created by the Iyann’s mouth forming the city’s magnificent harbor. Grand boulevards ran on great diagonals through Alaisor city from its northern and southern extremities, converging in a circle at the waterfront. At that meeting-point stood six gigantic obelisks of black stone, marking the place where Stiamot, the conqueror of the Metamorphs, had been buried seven thousand years before. Prestimion pointed the monument out to Varaile from the balcony on the west side of the building, which gave them a view that overlooked the harbor.

  The story was, he told her, that Stiamot, after becoming Pontifex, had decided in extreme old age to undertake a pilgrimage to Zimroel, to the Danipiur, the Metamorph high chieftain, for the sake of begging her forgiveness for the conquest. But his journey had ended here at Alaisor, where he fell ill and could not continue; and as he lay dying, looking outward toward the sea, he had asked to have his body laid to rest here instead of being carried thousands of miles eastward to the Labyrinth.

  “And the temple of the Lady?” Varaile asked. “Where is that?”

  They were on the uppermost floor of their suite. Prestimion led Varaile to the great curving eastern window, which faced the dark vertical wall of the cliffs. At this hour of the afternoon the westering sun bathed them in a bronzy-green sheen. “There,” he said. “Right below the rim—do you see?”

  “Yes. Like a white eye staring at us out of the forehead of the hill. Have you ever been there, Prestimion?”

  “Once. I visited Zimroel about a dozen years ago and spent a couple of weeks in Alaisor on the way, and Septach Melayn and I went up there. It’s a wonderful building, a slender curve of white marble one story high that seems to be hanging from the face of the cliff. You see the entire city laid out like its own map before you, and the sea beyond it, on and on halfway to the Isle.”

  “It sounds marvelous. Couldn’t we go there just for a little while tomorrow?”

  Prestimion smiled. “The Coronal can’t go anywhere ‘just for a little while.’ That building up there’s the second most sacred site on Majipoor. If I visited it at all, I’d have to stay overnight at the very least and meet with the Hierarch and her acolytes, and there’d be ceremonies and such, and all manner of other—well, you see how it is, Varaile. Whatever I do has heavy symbolic importance. And the ship to the Isle can’t wait: the winds are favorable to the west, and we need to leave tomorrow. Once the wind turns against you here, it can cause delays of many months, and I can’t risk that now. We can visit the temple the next time we’re in Alaisor.”

  “And when will that be? The world is so big, Prestimion! Is there time for us ever to see the same place twice?”

  “In four or five years,” he said, “when things are a little more settled in the world, it’ll be appropriate for me to make a grand processional, and we’ll go everywhere. I mean everywhere, Varaile. Even over to Zimroel: Piliplok, Ni-moya, Dulorn, Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal. We’ll come through Alaisor again then, and we’ll stay longer. I promise you we will. Whatever we’ve missed on this trip we’ll see then.”

  “‘We,’ you say. Does the Coronal’s wife go with him on the grand processional? Lord Confalume’s wife didn’t, when he came to Stee on his last processional.”

  “Different Coronal. Different sort of wife. You’ll be at my side, Varaile, wherever I go.”

  “That’s a firm promise?”

  “A solemn vow. I swear it by Lord Stiamot’s whiskers. Here in the very shadow of his tomb.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “I guess it’s settled, then,” she said.

  He had never been to the Isle of Sleep. Indeed in his days as a prince of the
Castle it had never occurred to him to go there. One did not ordinarily go to the Isle unless one had some special need to undergo a rite of purification. It was not even customary for Coronals to visit it unless they were making a grand processional, and it was too soon in his reign for that.

  But now the Isle was rising before him on the horizon like a wondrous white wall, and the sight of it set strange excitement churning within him.

  “You will be surprised at how big it is,” everyone who had been there constantly said. And so, having been duly warned, Prestimion expected not to be surprised; but he was, all the same. An island, he had always thought, was a body of land that was completely surrounded by water, and islands were usually fairly small. The Isle of Sleep was a big island, everyone said, and he interpreted that to mean a very large body of land that was completely surrounded by water. But he still visualized it as something whose borders could be perceived as curving away on all sides to the ocean. In fact, though, the Isle was immense, so big that on any other world it would have been called a continent. Seen from out here in the sea, it certainly seemed to have a continent’s vast extent. It was only by comparison with Alhanroel, Zimroel, and Suvrael, the three officially designated continents of Majipoor, that anyone could have thought of giving the Isle any lesser designation.

  One of the many wonderful stories that they told about the Isle was that in distant ancient times—millions of years ago, before there had been Shapeshifters, even, on Majipoor—it all had lain far below the surface of the sea, but had been thrust upward into the air in a single day and a single night by some awesome convulsion of the world’s interior. Which was why it was so sacred a place: the hand of the Divine had taken hold of it and brought it forth from the waters.