Sorcerers of Majipoor m-4 Read online

  West of the river they found themselves in settled country again, bustling cities of medium size surrounded by agricultural zones; and here, as soon as Prestimion announced himself to the people, they greeted him as a deliverer and as their Coronal. In these parts people knew little of Korsibar, and found it hard to understand how he had been able to take possession of the throne, when a Coronal’s son was never supposed to follow his father to the kingship. Among these good conservative countryfolk Prestimion was gladly hailed as the rightful king and they flocked eagerly to his standard.

  He set up his camp as he had planned, in the great Marraitis meadowlands, where for thousands of years the finest mounts of Majipoor had been reared. The best breeders came to him with their herds of strong fighting animals, and freely made the most spirited of them available for his cavalry.

  Word went forth far and wide, too, that Prestimion was collecting an army to march on Castle Mount and overthrow the false Coronal; and the response was enthusiastic. Hardly a day went by without a detachment of troops from some city of the region arriving at his camp. “I would rather die here with you than abide that unlawful man in the Castle,” is what they told him, over and over again. And so Prestimion welcomed gladly into their midst such men as the white-bearded Duke Miaule of Hither Miaule, with some five hundred green-jacketed warriors skilled at handling mounts; and Thurm of Sirynx, with a thousand more all clad in that city’s turquoise stripes; and the radiant young golden-haired Spalirises, son of Spalirises of Tumbrax, at the head of a great force; and Gynim of Tapilpil, with a corps of sling-casters in purple jerkins; and bold Abantes of Pytho, and Talauus of Naibilis, and many more of that caliber; and also troops from Thannard and Zarang and Abisoane and two dozen other places that Prestimion had never heard of, but whose assistance he welcomed all the same. The outpouring of support amazed and gratified him greatly. His brothers Abrigant and Taradath came too, with what seemed like half the able-bodied men of Muldemar city. They said that Teotas, the youngest brother, would have joined them also, but that their mother the Princess Therissa refused to let him go.

  And finally came the news Prestimion had anticipated most keenly, without ever quite daring to believe that he would ever hear it: word that a huge army under the command of Gaviad and Gaviundar, the brothers to Dantirya Sambail, had landed some weeks ago at Alaisor and was making its way quickly overland to Marraitis to join the growing rebel force. Dantirya Sambail himself, the message added, had been delayed in Ni-moya by the responsibilities he held as Procurator there, but would be leaving Zimroel shortly and would affiliate himself with Prestimion’s armies as quickly as he could.

  Was it so? Yes. Yes. Hot on the heels of this message, the outriders of the Zimroel force appeared, and then the bulk of the army, with the Procurator’s two brothers riding at his head.

  “This is quite a pair, these brothers of Dantirya Sambail,” said Gialaurys softly to Septach Melayn, watching them arrive. “They are of the same pretty breed as their elder brother, are they not?”

  “Even prettier, far prettier,” said Septach Melayn. “They are true paragons of beauty.”

  Gaviad and Gaviundar shared Dantirya Sambail’s ruddy orange hair and freckled complexion, and they were as gloriously ugly as he was, though in differing ways. Gaviad, the older of the two, was short and thick, watery-eyed and blubbery-faced, with a great red blob of a nose and a coarse fiery mustache jutting out like tufts of copper wire beneath it, above marvelously fleshy sagging lips; he was a heavy man, of monstrous appetites, with a chest like a drum and a belly like a swollen sack. His brother Gaviundar was much taller, of a height nearly approaching Septach Melayn’s, and his face was broad and perpetually flushed, with small cruel blue-green eyes flanked by the largest and thickest ears any human had ever been given, ears that were like wagon-wheels. He had gone bald very young: all that remained of his hair was two astonishing bristly tufts springing far out from the sides of his head. But as if to compensate, he had grown himself a dense and tangled reddish-yellow beard, so huge that birds could hide in it, that tumbled like a cataract down to the middle of his chest. He was, like Gaviad, an inordinate eater and a man with a colossal capacity for drink; but Gaviundar held his wine well, whereas stumpy little Gaviad, it quickly became evident, took great pleasure in drinking himself into a stupor as frequently as possible.

  That could be tolerated, Prestimion decided, as long as the man could fight. And in any event the brothers had come with a great horde of troops that they had raised along the eastern coast of Zimroel, mainly from Piliplok and Ni-moya, but from twenty other cities as well.

  All through the autumn and winter and on into spring, Prestimion labored to meld these variously assorted soldiers into a single effective fighting force. The one question now was when and how to move against Korsibar.

  Prestimion inclined to his original strategy of marching through the foothills of Castle Mount, making the circuit once again from Simbilfant to Ghrav to Arkilon to Pruiz and all the way around past Lontano and Da back to Vilimong, this time at the head of a large and ever-increasing army that eventually would go swarming up the side of Castle Mount and demand Korsibar’s abdication. But Gialaurys had a different course in mind. “Let us wait here in the middle of Alhanroel for Korsibar to come out and chastise us,” he said. “We smash his army beyond all repair, out here far from the Mount; and then we proceed at will to the Castle, accepting the surrender of any troops we might encounter along the way.”

  There was merit in both plans. Prestimion arrived at no quick decision.

  Then one day Duke Svor came to him and said, “We have reliable dispatches from the other side of the Jhelum. Two large armies, far greater even than our own, are approaching us: one under Farholt, taking the southern route around the Trikkalas, and the other led by Navigorn, traveling the northern way. Farholt brings with him an enormous force of war-mollitors. Once they’ve crossed the river, they plan to come up behind us, one army from above and one from below, and catch us between them and grind us to pieces.”

  “Then our strategy is settled,” Gialaurys said. “We’ll meet them here at Marraitis, as I proposed.”

  “No,” said Prestimion. “If we wait for them here until they’ve joined forces, we’re lost. Big as our army is, we’re outnumbered by far, if we can believe reports. Either they’ll shatter us here in the meadowlands, if that’s so, or they’ll drive us eastward until they can shove us into the river.”

  “What do you suggest, then?” asked Septach Melayn.

  Prestimion said to Svor, “Which army is likely to reach the Jhelum first?”

  “Farholt’s, I would say. The southern route is quicker.”

  “Good. Let him come. We’ll feed him to his own monitors. What I propose is this: we cross the Jhelum first, while he’s still camped on the eastern shore building his boats, and come around behind him. The one thing Farholt isn’t going to be expecting from us is an attack on his eastern flank.”

  “Can we get there quickly enough?” Septach Melayn asked.

  “We got here quickly enough, didn’t we?” Prestimion said.

  * * *

  That night Prestimion wandered the camp by himself, pausing now to speak with Valirad Visto, who had charge of the mounts, and with Duke Miaule of Miaule, and Thurm of Sirynx and Destinn Javad of Glaunt, and even going over into the Zimroel force to pass some time with Gaviad and Gaviundar. Gaviad was long gone in drink by the time Prestimion got there, but big shaggy-bearded Gaviundar greeted Prestimion as though they were not simply distant kinsmen but actual brothers, giving him an enveloping embrace out of which emanated a great stink of garlic and dried sea-dragon meat. “We have waited much too long in life to get to know each other,” Gaviundar bellowed. “But we will be good close friends once you are installed at the Castle, eh, Prestimion?” He had been drinking too, it seemed. And he said also, “My brother the Procurator thinks you are the finest man in the world, bar none. He looks forward to the day you ascend the
throne as keenly as though it were he who were being made Coronal rather than you.”

  “I’m grateful for all his assistance,” said Prestimion. “And yours, and that of your brother too,” he added, with a glance at Gaviad, who sat in full armor, slumped forward with his face in his plate, snoring loudly enough to summon lovesick gappapaspes from the distant river.

  And when he had returned to his own side of the camp, Prestimion went from this tent to that one, restless, far from any desire for sleep, though it was very late now. He spoke with his brother Taradath for a while, and then with Septach Melayn, and with young Spalirises, who could scarcely contain himself in his eagerness to see action.

  A light was still shining in the tent of Thalnap Zelifor; when Prestimion looked in, he found the Vroon wizard at his worktable, bent intently over something that looked somewhat like a kind of rohilla—an intricate circular weavery of bright gold wires and bits of crystal, it was, but far too big to be any sort of an amulet, ten times a rohilla’s size, more like a crown than anything else. “What is this?” Prestimion asked. “Some new kind of witchery-device? Are you conjuring up success for us with this in our attack on Farholt?”

  “No witchery here, O Prestimion. Do you remember that I told you, when we were prisoners together in the tunnels, that I was building a mechanism by which I could amplify the waves coming from people’s minds, and read their thoughts, and put thoughts of my own into their heads?”

  “The thing that Gonivaul had hired you to devise, yes. Is this it?”

  “That is an attempt to reconstruct it,” said the Vroon. “I left my half-finished trial model and all my notes behind in the Castle when we so suddenly took our leave of the place. But I have started again on it, and have been working at it all the while we’ve been here.”

  “With what purpose in mind?”

  “Why, the purpose of reaching out across the Jhelum and making contact with the minds of our enemies as they approach us, and perceiving their strategies and intentions.”

  “Ah,” said Prestimion. “What a useful thing! And are you able do it?”

  “Not yet,” the Vroon said sadly. “Certain essential parts remain in my room at the Castle with all my other machines both perfected and incomplete, and I have not yet found a way of replicating them here. But I continue to work. It is my great hope, O Prestimion, to present you with this wondrous device before long, as recompense for your saving my life at the Castle.”

  “Was Dantirya Sambail who saved your life, not I,” said Prestimion, grinning. “And that only by accident, I think. He was the one forced Korsibar’s hand, and you were freed by the same stroke that sprang me from that dungeon. But no matter: finish your device, and you’ll be well-rewarded for it. We are not so numerous and mighty here that we wouldn’t benefit from being able to read our enemies’ minds.”

  He bade Thalnap Zelifor good night, and left him still bent over his coils of golden wire. In his own tent Prestimion sat for a while, thinking about what was to come, and then in time he felt sleep steal over him at last, and dreams as well.

  What he dreamed was that he held the planet that was Majipoor in the palm of his hand like an orb, and he looked down at the world in his hand and perceived it to be a vast and intricately embroidered tapestry that was hanging in some dim and shadowy stone hall where a fire flickered. Despite the gloomy darkness of that hall, the details of the tapestry stood out with marvelous clarity. By the flickering of the firelight he saw in it all manner of elaborately woven elves and demons and strange beasts and birds moving to and fro in dark forests and thickets of thorny scrub, and here and there a brilliantly blossoming glade. In its weave he made out glints of sunlight and starlight, and bright patches of gold, and the gleam of wondrous jewels, and the differing sheens of human hair and the scales of serpents. And everything was wondrous beyond all understanding, haloed around with an aura of supreme beauty.

  The dream remained with him when he woke, holding him in an eerie magical grasp. But then he went to the door of his tent and looked out, and it was gray and raining out there, not at all magical. Not merely raining: pouring. A deluge.

  * * *

  Rains accompanied them all the way back to the Jhelum, day after day. The world seemed to have turned to an ocean of slippery mud. “I would rather cross that accursed Ekesta Pass ten times running than travel through this,” Gialaurys said, cursing; but they traveled onward anyway, through a dreadful realm of soggy dank marshland that had been easy fields on their journey westward the year before. Between one night and the next, winter had arrived in the Jhelum Valley, and winter was a season of never-halting rain in this region, it seemed.

  Then they came to the Jhelum itself; and found it in wild spate, high above its old level and far outside its former boundaries, and running with a terrible turbulence where beforetimes it had merely been very swift.

  The boats and rafts that they had left for themselves by the shore in the autumn had all been swept away by the flooding. But they were in need of new ones anyway, for they were vastly greater in number now than the army that had come across the river in the other direction; and so they set about once more building boats, and chopping saplings and lashing them into rafts. But would it be possible to cross at all, until after the rains? Already that looked doubtful; and the river grew ever higher every day.

  Prestimion called for volunteers to make the crossing and spy out the situation on the far side. A thousand men stepped forward; he picked six, and sent them off on a sturdy little raft, and watched anxiously as they bobbed and tossed on the stormy swollen river. It was so wide now that it was nearly impossible to see all the way to the other shore through the unending rain; but Septach Melayn, posted in a watchtower, stared into the distant dimness and said finally, “Yes, they are across!”

  They were gone six days. Then they returned with news that Farholt’s army had reached the Jhelum also and was camped by its edge, thirty miles downriver from them, waiting for the weather to improve.

  “How many are there?” Prestimion asked.

  “It would have taken all week again to count them.”

  “And the mollitors?”

  “They have hundreds with them,” said one of the spies. “A thousand, maybe.”

  That was ominous news. Mollitors were the deadliest of all beasts-of-war: colossal armor-plated creatures of synthetic origin, first created, like mounts and energy-throwers and airborne vehicles and many other such things, in the ancient times when scientific skills had been greater on Majipoor, and sustained ever since by natural breeding of the old stock. Wide-bodied short-legged things with purple leathery hides hard as iron, they had savage curved claws that could rip a tree apart the way a child might pull leaves from a plant, and massive heads with huge, heavy irresistible jaws designed for rending and crushing. Though they had little intelligence, their strength was so formidable that it was all but impossible to withstand it. And Farholt had brought hundreds of them to the shore of the Jhelum. Thousands, it might be.

  Prestimion said to Septach Melayn, “Take four battalions—no, take five, cavalry and foot-soldiers both—and get you down south to the riverbank opposite Farholt’s camp, with plenty of our best mounts. Set up fortifications there, and drill your troops, and make sure you’re seen and heard as you shout your commands. Let there be much clatter every day, and all night long too. Build boats, with all the hammering you can manage. Blow your trumpets; beat your drums, march up and down along the shore. Have your men sing battle-songs, if you can invent some, with all their might. Send spies out by night on the water to stare into Farholt’s encampment. Do everything, in short, that would announce to Farholt that you are on the verge of crossing the river and attacking him. Everything, that is, except actually to attack.”

  “Great noise will come from us,” Septach Melayn vowed.

  “On the third day, launch your boats toward Farholt by night, preferably in the rain, if it’s still raining, and take no pains to be silent about
that either. But turn back after a hundred strokes of the oars. The next night, go out a hundred fifty strokes into the river, and turn back again. Do the same the following night as well. But that night the attack will be no feint.”

  “I understand,” said Septach Melayn.

  Prestimion, meanwhile, assembled his own assault group, seven battalions of his finest infantrymen and archers, with the remainder of the cavalry force to ride behind them. It took two days to make everything ready; the morning after that he led them seventeen miles upstream, to a place where his reconnaissance men had discovered a large and heavily wooded island in the midst of the river. That would make the crossing easier, having such a place midway to halt. Nor would they be seen there while they regrouped behind the trees, even if Farholt’s scouts were ranging that far up the river. By night, using boats and rafts, he crossed with all his troops over to the island, pausing there to survey and rearrange his force, then proceeding onward about two hours before midnight to the Jhelum’s eastern shore.

  The night was moonless; there was no illumination except from the terrifying bolts of lightning that flashed again and again. Rain came in torrents, driven sidewise into their faces by the relentless wind. But that wind blew from the west and carried their little boats swiftly across. Prestimion made his crossing in one of the smallest boats, accompanied only by Gialaurys and his brother Taradath: they talked of nothing but the coming battle.