Lord Prestimion

  “All I ask is that you take the opportunity to get to know her a little better. Will you do that much?”

  “It’s important to you that I do, I see.”

  “It is.”

  “Well, then. For your sake, Septach Melayn, I will. But don’t arouse any false hopes in her, my good friend. However much you may want me to, I’m not about to take a wife. If you yearn so much for there to be marriage festivities at the Castle, you can marry her.”

  “If you choose not to,” said Septach Melayn airily, “then I will.”

  5

  It had been Lord Confalume’s custom, and Lord Prankipin’s before him, to hold invitational royal receptions on the second Starday of each month. Various prominent citizens of the realm were brought before the Coronal and honored with a moment or two of his attention. Prestimion, though he found the custom fatuous and even distasteful, was aware of its usefulness in forging the ties through which governance was achieved. A moment spent in the presence of a Coronal was something that would remain with a citizen for a lifetime; that person would always think of himself as affiliated in some way with the grandeur and power of that Coronal, and would feel enhanced by that, and profoundly grateful, and eternally loyal.

  This was only the third such reception that Prestimion had been able to find time to hold since his accession. Since it was primarily an act of political theater, the royal levee needed careful staging and thorough rehearsal. Among other things, he had to spend an hour or two, the night before, going over the list of events with Zeldor Luudwid, the chamberlain in charge of such events, memorizing some flattering fact about each honoree. Then, on the day of the ceremony, at least an hour more was required for proper robing. He must look overwhelmingly regal. That meant not merely some costume in the traditional green and gold, the colors that symbolized to any viewer the office and the power of the Coronal. It meant elaborate overembellishment: varying combinations of fur mantles, silken scarves, stiff flaring epaulets, diadems and gems, all manner of frills and furbelows, this bit of trimming and that one being put on him and removed and put on him again until just the right mix of grandiosity was attained.

  Today the basic costume was a high-waisted loose-fitting golden velvet doublet, paned at the chest in front and back to reveal the green silk shirt beneath. The doublet’s wide winged sleeves, similarly paned to the elbow, then close-fitting to the wrists, ended in turned-back lace cuffs partly concealed by handsome gauntlet gloves of crimson leather. His boots, of the same leather, were turned down to reveal green silk stockings.

  The boots caused trouble, because they were padded in the sole to add two inches to his height. Prestimion had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was not as tall as many other men, and that mattered not at all to him. Indeed, he rarely gave it a thought. The artificial boosting that these boots provided was offensive to him, and he asked for them to be taken away and replaced by a normal pair. Only after a fifteen-minute delay was it determined that no unpadded boots of a color appropriate to the rest of his costume existed in his closet, and therefore he would have to begin the robing all over again with a doublet of a different shade of gold. Which brought a hot burst of anger from him, because it was too late to start doing that; and in the end he wore the padded boots, although it made him suddenly self-conscious to find himself looking at the world from a height two inches greater than usual.

  On his brow, of course, was the grand starburst crown of Lord Confalume, that preposterous intricate confection of emeralds and rubies and purple diniabas and dazzling metal chasings, a thing that announced in a voice of thunder that its wearer was the properly anointed incarnation of the majesty of the realm. And on his chest rested the golden medallion that Confalume had given him at his coronation, with the signet-seal of Lord Stiamot in its center. It was, ostensibly, a modern reproduction of the medallion that the Coronals of antiquity had worn. But in fact it was no such thing. Prestimion himself, in conspiracy with Serithorn and the late and no longer remembered Prince Korsibar, had invented the tale of the medallion out of thin air and designed a plausible-looking “reproduction” of the supposedly long-lost original as a gift for Lord Confalume to celebrate his fortieth year as Coronal. Now it had been passed onward to Prestimion himself, and would, he supposed, go marching on down through the centuries from Coronal to Coronal, revered and cherished. After a couple of hundred years it would probably be an unquestioned article of faith that the half-legendary Stiamot himself had worn this very one, an eon and a quarter ago. In such ways, he thought, are potent traditions born.

  Lord Confalume also had bedecked the throne-room with the tripods and censers and astrological computing-machines of his court wizards, not because these devices played any part in the official ceremonies of the court, but simply because in his later years he had come to like having such things about him. But Prestimion was a less credulous man than Confalume. He was well enough aware, in a calculating way, of the value and uses of sorcery in modern-day Majipoor, but he had never managed to arrive at a completely comfortable acceptance of the way the public had embraced so much that was mere superstition and chicanery.

  Therefore he had banned all of Confalume’s implements of magic from the room. But he did permit a magus or two to be on hand for his receptions, if only to gratify public taste. If they needed to believe that he ruled not just by the grace of the Divine but also with the aid of whichever demons, spirits, or other supernal powers the people of Majipoor currently held in high esteem, he would not deny that to them.

  Maundigand-Klimd was the magus on duty today—a Su-Suheris was always valuable for instilling awe—and, at Septach Melayn’s special request, so also were two geomancers from Tidias, complete with their tall brass helmets and shining metallic robes. Lord Confalume had brought them to the Castle in his time, along with a great host of others of their profession, and they all still seemed to be here and on the public payroll, although they had no official function in the administration of the new Coronal. Apparently these two had complained of their idleness to Septach Melayn, a man of Tidias himself; and so they were here, standing sternly on either side of Maundigand-Klimd, impressive brass-helmeted symbols of the realm of supernatural forces that existed side by side with the visible world that was everyday Majipoor. They were not, though, permitted to utter invocations or draw their invisible lines of power on the floor or burn their colored powders of mystic virtue. They were mere decorations, like the clustered masses of moonstones and tourmalines and amethysts and sapphires that Lord Confalume, when he had this room built, had caused at enormous expense to be inserted into the gigantic gilded beams of the ceiling.

  “Your lordship,” said the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand. “It’s time for the reception.”

  So it was. Prestimion left his robing-chamber and made his way, awkward in his thick-soled boots, through the hallways of the ancient myriad-roomed Castle that he had inherited from his multitude of royal predecessors. He would, he knew—eventually, in the fullness of his years—place his own imprint on the Castle of the Coronal. It was the tradition, after all, for each ruler to make his own additions and modifications.

  The series of minor rooms that lay between the robing-chamber and the Confalume throne-room, for instance, seemed like a poor employment of the space they occupied. He had it in mind to clear them all away and construct a great judgment-hall next to the throne-room itself, something huge and grand, with crystal chandeliers and windows of frosted glass. An austere but imposing chapel nearby for the private reflections of the Coronal might be worthwhile, too. The present one was an awkward little afterthought of a room with no architectural merit whatever. And outside the central core, perhaps over by the watchtower of lunatic design that Lord Arioc of long ago had built, Prestimion wanted to erect a museum of Majipoori history, an archive containing memorabilia of the world’s long past, where future Coronals could study the achievements of their predecessors and contemplate their own high intentions. But all that was
for the future. His reign had only just begun.

  Unsmiling, looking neither to left nor right, walking stiffly in an attempt to avoid tripping over his own troublesome boots, he entered the throne-room, solemnly inclined his head as his subjects greeted him with starbursts, and ascended the many steps of the mahogany pedestal atop which the throne itself was set.

  Solemnly. That was the key. He knew better than anyone what empty mummery such a spectacle as this really was. Its prime and perhaps only purpose was to awe the credulous. Yet for all his intelligence and sophistication and that touch of irreverence that he hoped he would never lose, Prestimion was more than somewhat awed by it too. A Coronal must believe his own mummery, he knew, or the people never would.

  And that faith in the grandeur and might of the Coronal Lord, rooted in this very pageantry, this showy business of robes and thrones and crowns, had had much to do, he was certain, with the general tranquility and prosperity of this great world over the thirteen thousand years since humans first had come to settle on it. The Coronal was the embodiment of the whole world’s hopes and fears and desires. All of that had now been entrusted to the care of Prestimion of Muldemar, who understood only too well that he was human and mortal, but must nevertheless conduct himself as though he were much more than that. If for the sake of the public good he must don ornately fanciful green-and-gold robes and sit with solemn face upon a gigantic gleaming block of black opal shot through with veins of blood-scarlet ruby, so be it: he would play his part as he was expected to do.

  To his left, as he took the throne, stood the chamberlain Zeldor Luudwid, with a table beside him on which the decorations to be handed out today were piled. A little farther on was Maundigand-Klimd, who was flanked to right and left, as though they were bookends, by the two Tidias geomancers. On the other side of the throne were a couple of secondary chamberlains—two massive Skandars who were huge even as Skandars went—carrying great staffs of office. Prestimion caught sight of Septach Melayn in the shadows just beyond, studying him thoughtfully. For the High Counsellor to attend a levee was a bit unusual; but Prestimion had a good idea of why Septach Melayn had showed up here today.

  For there was Simbilon Khayf out there, plainly visible among the multitude of citizens who would be presented to the Coronal this day—that rigid pile of glittering silver hair was unmistakable—and there was the lady Varaile, tall and stately and beautiful, at her father’s side. And Septach Melayn—damn him!—was here, Prestimion realized, to supervise her meeting with the Coronal.

  “His lordship the Coronal Prestimion welcomes you to the Castle,” Zeldor Luudwid intoned grandly, “and bids you know that he has studied your attainments and achievements with care and regards each of you as an ornament of the realm.”

  It was the standard greeting. Prestimion, only half listening, nevertheless adopted a pose of seeming attentiveness, sitting staunchly upright and looking serenely outward at the waiting crowd. He took care, though, not to let his eyes fasten on anyone in particular. He aimed his gaze well above their heads, so that it rested on the glowing tapestry on the far wall, the one depicting Lord Stiamot receiving the homage of the conquered Metamorphs.

  Idly he wondered, not for the first time, how many thousands of royals Confalume had expended while he was Coronal in the course of creating the fabulous throne-room that bore his name. Prestimion made a mental note to search the archives some day for the exact amount. Probably it was more than Stiamot had spent to build the original Castle in the first place. It had taken years to construct this high-vaulted room, with its gem-encrusted beams covered with hammered sheets of pale-red gold, its spectacular tapestries, its floor of costly yellow gurna-wood. The throne alone must surely have cost a fortune—not just for that colossal block of black opal of which it was fashioned, but for the stout silver pillars beside it and the great canopy of gold, inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, that those pillars supported, and for the starburst symbol above all the rest, made of white platinum tipped by spheres of purple onyx.

  But of course the money had been there for Confalume to spend. Majipoor had never known such a time of affluence and general well-being as it had in his reign.

  Much of that was due to good luck: a general absence, for many decades now, of droughts, floods, great storms, and other natural disasters. But also the former Coronal—building on the work of his predecessor, Lord Prankipin—had promulgated a sharp cut in taxation, with immediate benefits, and had gone to great lengths to seek out and extirpate ancient and foolish trade restrictions that were holding back the free flow of goods from one province to another. He had acted in many other ways to eliminate all manner of unneeded regulatory impediments, also. In this he had had the valuable support of Dantirya Sambail, who as Procurator of Ni-moya had come over the years to rule the lesser continent of Zimroel virtually as a king in his own right. Many of those ancient trade regulations had originally been enacted to protect the interests of Zimroel against the older and more fully developed continent of Alhanroel. But Dantirya Sambail understood that all those obsolete restrictions were by now doing more harm than good and had raised no objection to striking them from the books. As a result there had been an enormous worldwide increase in productivity and in the general welfare of all.

  From Prestimion’s point of view that was both good and bad. He had been given the throne of a wondrously thriving realm, and though it was necessary now to cope with the damage that the civil war had done and the fact that Dantirya Sambail had ceased to be an agent for the general good and had become an obstacle to its continuation, Prestimion was confident that both of those problems could be dealt with quickly enough. They had better be. His name would be cursed forever if during the years ahead he failed to sustain the level of prosperity that had been reached in the time of Lord Confalume.

  One by one the day’s chosen ornaments of the realm, whose attainments and achievements the Coronal had studied with such care, were summoned to the throne to be acknowledged for all that they had done.

  No members of the titled nobility were here today. The aristocracy received its rewards in other ways. The group now gathered before the Coronal was made up of humbler folk: elected officials of cities or provinces, and an assortment of businesspeople, and farmers who had in one noteworthy fashion or another advanced the state of agriculture; and also artists and writers, stage performers, athletes, even a scholar or two.

  Usually Prestimion was able to call from his memory the reason why each of them was being honored in this day’s ceremony, or to guess it from some phrase of the introductions that Zeldor Luudwid provided. Where he could not come up with anything specific, he was always able, at least, to make some general remark that passed as appropriate. Thus, when the mayor of Khyntor in Zimroel came forward to be acclaimed for some undoubtedly significant municipal accomplishment, Prestimion had no recollection at all of what it was the good woman had done, but it was not a difficult matter for him to hold forth with great vigor on the famous bridges of Khyntor, those remarkable engineering feats, miraculously spanning the stupendous width of the River Zimr, that any child on Majipoor would have known something about. When a soul-painter from Sefarad who had done a celebrated series of canvasses depicting the tide-pools of Varfanir approached the throne, Prestimion realized that he had confused the man with another soul-painter famous for his portraits of ballerinas, and was not sure which was the tide-pool man and which the connoisseur of the dance. He offered, instead, a brief discourse on the marvels of soul-painting itself, speaking of the fascination he had for that medium, in which artists imprinted their visions on cunningly prepared psychosensitive fabric, and expressed his hope to do a little soul-painting himself one day when the cares of government permitted him the leisure to master the art. And so forth: one deft little speech after another, graceful, well turned, kingly, after which Zeldor Luudwid presented the honoree with the appropriate insignia of distinction, a bright riband or sparkling medallion or something of the like, and gentl
y sent him back to his seat, pleasantly dazed by his encounter with greatness.

  Simbilon Khayf was one of the last to be presented. For him, of course, Prestimion had no problems of memory. He spoke first of the importance of such private banks as Simbilon Khayf’s in stimulating the growth of entrepreneurial industry on Majipoor, and then turned easily to a synopsis of Simbilon Khayf’s own great achievement in rising from the humble ranks of the factory-workers of Stee to his present eminence in the world of finance. Simbilon Khayf’s eyes did not leave Prestimion’s as the Coronal delivered his encomium; and once again Prestimion wondered whether this shrewd, unpleasant man might somehow have succeeded in linking the crowned king high atop the throne before him with the bewhiskered merchant who had come to him at his mansion in Stee seeking a loan.

  But Simbilon Khayf betrayed no such awareness. Throughout the entire time of his audience with the Coronal his face wore an unvarying expression of frozen humility and awe; and when he accepted from Zeldor Luudwid the golden wreath of the Order of Lord Havilbove and muttered his thanks, his voice was thick and husky with emotion and his hands were trembling, as though he was barely able to withstand the immense importance of the honor that had been bestowed upon him.

  After the ceremony the Coronal always held a more casual reception in one of the adjacent rooms for the recipients of the more important decorations. Here, now, Prestimion knew, would come the triumphal moment of Septach Melayn’s stage-managing. For those who had been awarded the Order of Lord Havilbove were entitled to attend the second reception. Inevitably Prestimion would find himself confronting Simbilon Khayf and his daughter once again, in circumstances where conversations of an extended sort would be hard to avoid. Impossible, actually.