Lord Prestimion

  “Lord Kybris, it was, who built it,” Septach Melayn said.

  “Kybris, yes,” said Prestimion. “Well, we’ll build a klorbigan fence of our own, a patrol line without any breaks in it, so that if Dantirya Sambail decides to swing around once again and go north, he’ll be picked up in—” He paused in mid-sentence. “Navigorn? Navigorn, what’s the matter?”

  Everyone stared. Big black-bearded Navigorn had turned away suddenly from his map and was doubled into a crouch, head bowed and arms clutching his middle, as if in some terrible racking spasm of pain. After a moment he raised his head, and Prestimion saw that Navigorn’s features were contorted into a horrifying grimace. Appalled, Prestimion signaled for Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, who were closest to him, to go to his aid. But Maundigand-Klimd acted first: the Su-Suheris lifted one hand and inclined his two heads toward each other, and something invisible passed between him and Navigorn, and within a moment the entire strange episode appeared to have ended. Navigorn was standing upright as though nothing at all had occurred, blinking the way one might after having dropped into an unexpected doze. His face was calm.—“Did you say something, Prestimion?”

  “A very singular expression came over you, and I asked you what the matter was. It seemed you were having a seizure of some sort.”

  “I was? A seizure?” Navigorn looked bewildered. “But I have no recollection of any such thing.” Then he brightened. “Ah! Then it must have happened again, without my knowing it!”

  “Then this is something frequent with you?” asked Septach Melayn.

  “It has occurred more than once,” said Navigorn, looking a little sheepish now. Plainly he was abashed to be making this admission of weakness. But he plunged forward even so. “Along with great headaches, yes, that come and go suddenly, so that I think my skull will split open. And terrible dreams, very often. I have never had dreams of such a sort before.”

  “Will you tell us of them?” asked Prestimion gently.

  It was a delicate thing, asking someone—a nobleman, a warrior at that—to reveal his dreams in such a group. But Navigorn said unhesitatingly, “I am on a battlefield, again and again, a great muddy field where men are dying on all sides and streams of blood run underfoot. Who among us has ever fought a pitched battle, my lord? Who ever will, on this peaceful world? But I am there, armed and armored, laying about me with my sword, killing with every stroke. I kill strangers and I kill friends too, my lord.”

  “You kill me, perhaps? Septach Melayn?”

  “No, not you. I don’t know who they are who fall to my sword. They are not people whose faces I can identify when I awaken and think back upon my dream. But as I lie dreaming I know that I am killing dear friends, and it sickens me, my lord. It sickens me.” Navigorn shivered, though the room was very warm. “I tell you, lordship, this dream comes to me over and over, sometimes three nights running, so that by now I fear closing my eyes at all.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Prestimion asked.

  Navigorn said, shrugging, “Days? Weeks? It’s not something I can easily reckon up.—May I be excused for a few minutes?”

  Prestimion nodded. Flushed now and glossy with sweat, Navigorn went from the room. Prestimion said quietly to Septach Melayn, “Did you hear? A battle in which he kills his friends. This is one more thing for which I bear the guilt.”

  “My lord, what guilt there is in this is Korsibar’s,” said Septach Melayn.

  But Prestimion merely shook his head. Grim thoughts assailed him. Yes, the battle itself where so many had died had been of Korsibar’s making. Navigorn’s baffling dreams, though, his spasms of agony, his inner confusion long after the event, all of that was part of the new madness, and who was responsible for that if not Prestimion himself? This madness was something that his sorcerers had conjured upon the world at his behest, though he had not known it would happen.

  Abrigant broke suddenly into Prestimion’s meditation while they waited for Navigorn to return. “Brother, will you be going down yourself into the south-country to look for the Procurator, as you went east?”

  Prestimion was startled at that, because the thought had only just been forming in his own mind. But they were of one flesh, he and Abrigant, and often of the same mind as well. He said with a grin, “I might very well do that. It will need discussion before the full Council, of course. But his majesty the Pontifex has requested my presence at the Labyrinth, and he is right to so request; and as long as I’ve gone that far south, I’ll probably continue on toward Stoien in the hope of finding—”

  “You speak of the full Council,” said Septach Melayn. “While Navigorn is out of the room, let me ask this, Prestimion: suppose some member of the Council—Serithorn, say, or my cousin Dembitave—demands from you outright to know why it is that Dantirya Sambail happens to be a fugitive whom you’re hunting from one end of Alhanroel to another? What would you say to him, then?”

  “Simply that he has given grave offense against the law and against the person of the Coronal.”

  “And you will offer no explanatory details of any sort?”

  “I remind you, Septach Melayn, he is Coronal,” said Gialaurys irascibly. “He can do as he pleases.”

  “Ah, no, good friend,” said Septach Melayn. “He is king, yes, but not a tyrant absolute. He’s subject to the decrees of the Pontifex as are we all, and he is accountable in some degree to the Council as well. Decreeing a great potentate like Dantirya Sambail to be a criminal, and giving no reason for it to his own Council—not even a Coronal can do that.”

  “You know why he must,” Gialaurys said.

  “Yes. Because there is one great fact that has been withheld from all the world, excepting only the five of us who are here, and Teotas who is not.” And Septach Melayn nodded toward Maundigand-Klimd and Abrigant, the two latecomers to the truth of what had happened that day at Thegomar Edge. “But we get deeper and deeper into equivocation and evasion and downright lying the longer we clutch that secret to our bosoms.”

  “Let it be, Septach Melayn,” Prestimion said. “I have no answers for these questions of yours, except to say that if the Council presses me too far on the subject of Dantirya Sambail’s unspecified crimes, I will equivocate and evade. And, if necessary, lie. But I like none of this any better than you do.—And now Navigorn’s coming back, so put an end to it.”

  Abrigant said, just as Navigorn was entering, “One further thing, brother: if you are going south into Aruachosia, I ask permission to accompany you part of the way.”

  “Only part?”

  “There is the place called Skakkenoir, which we discussed not long ago, where one can recover useful metals from the stems and leaves of the plants that grow there. It’s in the south, somewhere east of Aruachosia, perhaps even east of Vrist. While you hunt for Dantirya Sambail down there, I would go in search of Skakkenoir.”

  In some amusement Prestimion said, “I see that nothing will turn you from this quest. But the metal-bearing plants of Skakkenoir are a wild fantasy, Abrigant.”

  “Do we know that, brother? Allow me but to go and look.”

  Again Prestimion smiled. Abrigant was a relentless force. “Let’s speak of this later, shall we, Abrigant? This is not the time.—Well, Navigorn, are you recovered? Here, have a bit of this wine. It’ll soothe your soul. Now, as I was just about to say at the moment when Navigorn became ill: the Pontifex Confalume has reminded me that I am long overdue to call upon him in his new residence, and therefore—”

  That evening, just the two of them dining alone in the Coronal’s apartments, Septach Melayn said to Prestimion, “I see you wrestling with the matter of the great secret we keep, and I know how much anguish it gives you. How are we going to deal with this thing, Prestimion?”

  They sat face-to-face in Prestimion’s private dining-alcove, a seven-sided elevated room separated from its surroundings by an ascent of seven steps made of solid beams of black fire-oak, and bedecked by embroidered hangings a thousand years
old, silks of many colors interwoven with gold and silver threads, that depicted the sports of hunting and hawking.

  “If I had an answer for that,” said Prestimion, “I would have given it to you this afternoon.”

  Septach Melayn stared for a time at the grilled kaspok in his plate, a rare delicacy—a white fish of the northern rivers, with meat as sweet as fresh berries—that he had scarcely tasted. He took a sip of his wine, and then drank again, not a sip this time. “You wanted to heal the world’s pain, you told me, by wiping clean its memory of the war. To allow everyone a chance at a fresh start. Yes, all well and good. But this general madness that seems to have followed upon it—”

  “I never anticipated that. I would never have called for the obliteration, if I could have seen that that would happen. You know that, Septach Melayn.”

  “Of course I do. Do you think I’m holding you at fault?”

  “You seem to be.”

  “Not at all. Quite the opposite. The thing has happened, and I see you taking personal responsibility for it, and I see the effect that it’s having on you. Well, I say once again: what’s done is done. Leave off expending energy in guilt, and deal only with the challenges that we now face. You’ll harm yourself otherwise. When Navigorn had that fit today—”

  “Listen to me,” Prestimion said. “I am responsible for the madness. And for everything else that has befallen the world since I took the throne, and everything that will happen throughout my life. I am Coronal, and that means, above all else, the burden of responsibility for the world’s destiny. Which I am prepared to bear.”

  Septach Melayn attempted to speak, but Prestimion would not have it. “No. Hear me out.—Did you think I imagined that wearing the crown meant nothing more than grand processionals and splendid banquets and sitting here in the Castle’s opulent rooms amidst ancient draperies and statuary? When I made the decision at Thegomar Edge to cleanse the world of all awareness of the war, it was a hasty thing, and I see now that it may have been a poor choice. But it was my own decision for which I had valid reasons at the time and which still seems to me not altogether a misguided idea. Does that sound like a statement of a man tormented by guilt?”

  “You used the word yourself only today. Do you remember? ‘This is one more thing for which I bear the guilt.’”

  “A passing fancy, nothing more.”

  “Not so passing. And not such a fancy, Prestimion. I see into your soul as readily as any magus. Each new report of the madness racks you with pain.”

  “And if it does, is it worth ruining this fine dinner to tell me so? Pain fades with time. This kaspok was brought by swift couriers from the shores of Sintalmond Bay for your delectation and mine, and you allow that dainty piece of fish to turn to old leather in your plate while you belabor me with all this. Eat, Septach Melayn. Drink. I assure you, I’m ready to live with whatever discomfort the consequences of my decision at Thegomar Edge will bring me.”

  “All right,” said Septach Melayn. “Permit me to come to my true point, then. If you must live in pain, why do you condemn yourself to bearing that pain alone?”

  Prestimion looked at him without comprehension. “What are you talking about? How am I alone? I have you. I have Gialaurys. I have Maundigand-Klimd to offer me wisdom and consolation, both heads of him. I have my two sturdy brothers. I have—”

  “Thismet will not come back to life, Prestimion.”

  Septach Melayn’s bold words struck Prestimion like a slap across the face.

  “What?” he asked, after a stunned moment. “Does the madness have hold of you, now, that you talk such idiocy? Yes, Thismet is dead, and always will be. But—”

  “Are you going to spend the rest of your life in mourning for her?”

  “No one but you, Septach Melayn, would dare speak so close.”

  “You know me well. And speak close I do.” There was no way to deflect the singleminded force of Septach Melayn’s intensely focused blue gaze. “You live in terrible solitude, Prestimion. There was a time, in those few weeks before Thegomar Edge, when you seemed full of new life and joy, as though some piece of you that long was missing had at last been put into place. That piece was Thismet. It was plain to us all at Thegomar Edge that we were destined to smash Korsibar’s revolt that day, because you were our leader, and you had taken on an aura of invincibility. And so it befell; but in the hour of victory Thismet was slain, and nothing has been the same for you ever since.”

  “You tell me nothing that I do not already—”

  Coronal or no, Septach Melayn coolly overspoke him. “Let me finish, Prestimion. Thismet died, and it was the end of the world for you. You wandered the battlefield as though you were the one that had lost the war, not as though you had fought your way through to the throne. You called for the memory-obliteration, as if you needed to hide the dark circumstances surrounding your ascent from all the universe, and who could speak against you in that moment? On the very day of your coronation I came upon you in despair in the Hendighail Hall, and you said things to me that no one would have believed if I had repeated them beyond us two: the kingship meant nothing to you, you said, except years and years of hard joyless work, and then some time in the grimness of the Labyrinth while waiting for your death. All this despair I credit to the loss of Thismet.”

  “And if that’s so, what then?”

  “Why, you have to put Thismet from your mind, Prestimion! By the Divine, man, don’t you see that you must give her up? You’ll always love her, yes, but loving a ghost brings chilly comfort. You need a living consort, one who will share the glories of your reign when all is going as it should, and hold you in her arms in the darkness of the other times.”

  Septach Melayn’s fair skin was flushed now with the excitement of his own oratory. Prestimion stared at him in astonishment. This was presumption indeed. Septach Melayn was a uniquely privileged friend; only he in all the world could speak to him like this. But what he was saying now came near a breach of that privilege.

  Containing himself with no little effort, Prestimion asked, “And you have a candidate in mind for the post, I suppose?”

  “It happens that I do. The woman Varaile, of Stee.”

  “Varaile?”

  “You love her, Prestimion.—Oh, don’t start fulminating at me with protests! I saw it plain as day”

  “I’ve met her just once, for no more than an hour, while going under an assumed name and wearing false whiskers.”

  “It took five seconds, no more, for the thing to happen between you. She struck as deep into your soul as a woodsman’s axe, and struck such sparks from you that it lit the entire room.”

  “You think I’m made of metal within, then, that an axe will strike sparks against me? Or stone, perhaps.”

  “There could be no mistaking it: she for you, and you for her.”

  Prestimion found nothing here that he could deny. And yet it was outrageous to be invaded so intimately, even by Septach Melayn. He reached for the flask of wine that sat between them and held it contemplatively a long while with both his hands before refilling their bowls. At last he said, “What you propose is impossible. Varaile is a commoner, Septach Melayn, and her father is a gross and boorish beast.”

  “You wouldn’t be marrying her father.—As for her, Coronals have married commoners many a time. I will get the history books and quote you examples, if you like. In any case, all aristocrats spring from common families, if only you go back far enough. I mean no offense, Prestimion, but is it not true that the princely family of Muldemar itself sprang from a line of farmers and vintners?”

  “Ages ago, long before Lord Stiamot’s day, Septach Melayn. By the time he began to build this Castle we were already ennobled.”

  “And you will hold your nose and make Simbilon Khayf a count or an earl—not the first grubby vulgar moneylender to be granted such a dignity, I think—and by so doing, you’ll be able to make his daughter a queen.”

  It was a struggle now not to order
Septach Melayn from the room. Prestimion fought for inner calmness, and found some, and his tone was a level one as he replied, “You amaze me, my friend. I concede the point that grieving forever over Thismet would be folly, and a Coronal does well to provide himself with a consort. But would you really marry me to a woman I’ve known less than an hour? The question of her common birth completely aside: I remind you again, Septach Melayn, that she and I are complete strangers to each other.”

  “Which can readily be repaired. She’s in the Castle this very hour. Next week she comes before you at the royal reception. As has already been pointed out, if you ask her to join the ladies-in-waiting of the Castle, she’ll have no way to refuse. And then there’ll be ample opportunity for you and her to—”

  The anger that had been not very far from the surface in Prestimion a moment before dissolved now in laughter. “Ah, I see it all! You’ve contrived the whole thing very carefully, haven’t you, by dangling that offer of a royal reception before them?”

  “It was necessary to buy her silence, or Simbilon Khayf would have known who those three merchants were who came to him for a loan that day in Stee.”

  “So you’ve said. I wonder if there might not have been some simpler way to manage all that.—In any case, Septach Melayn, let us make an end of this. I want you to understand that at the present time the idea of marriage is extremely distant from my mind. Is that clear?”