Lord Prestimion

  Which must have been precisely what Septach Melayn had had in mind.

  Smoothly and swiftly Prestimion moved through the crowded room, exchanging a brief word with each of his guests. The unnaturally thick soles of his boots hampered him only a little, though it was odd to feel so tall. After a time he could see the uncouth spire of Simbilon Khayf’s hair just ahead of him in his direct path. Varaile, oddly, did not seem to be anywhere near her father; but then Prestimion caught sight of her on the other side of the room, speaking with Septach Melayn.

  The merchant banker still seemed overwhelmed by it all: He barely managed to make sense as he blurted out a little stammering speech of gratitude for the Coronal’s kindness in inviting him here today, which turned, after a moment or two, into a rambling and disjointed speech, accompanied by much heavy breathing and floridity of face, in praise of his own accomplishments. All perfectly in character, a flustered combination of high self-approbation and extreme insecurity. The banker’s wayward performance bolstered Prestimion’s feeling that the likelihood of Simbilon Khayf’s having guessed the connection between his bearded visitor in Khayf and the Coronal before whom he now stood was not very great. And plainly Varaile had not violated her promise to Septach Melayn to keep the truth about that to herself.

  Simbilon Khayf’s huffing and puffing went on and on and on. Prestimion detached himself finally and moved along through the throng; but it was ten minutes more before he came to Varaile.

  Their eyes met and for him it was just as it had been before, that other time in her father’s house in Stee: that disquieting tingle of electric connection, that quiver of excitement, of uncertainty, of confusion. And for her, too, of that he was certain: he saw the quick flaring of her nostrils, the brief quirking of the corners of her mouth, the sudden darting of her eyes from side to side, the flush slowly spreading over her flawless features.

  This is no illusion, he thought. This is something very real.

  But it passed quickly. In a flash, she was cool and calm and self-possessed again, the very model of a well-bred young woman who has no doubt of how to conduct herself in the presence of her king. As poised and proper as her father had been gauche and jumpy, she hailed him with the appropriate deference, making the starburst gesture to him and thanking him simply but warmly, in that deep, wondrously musical voice of hers that he remembered so well from Stee, for the great honor he had conferred upon her father. By the nature of the occasion nothing further was called for in this situation. It would have been easy enough now for Prestimion to acknowledge her gratitude with a quick impersonal word or two and move along to the next guest.

  But he saw Septach Melayn standing to one side with folded arms, watching keenly, smiling slyly, and knew that his friend occupied the position of power in this. The master duelist had backed him into a corner. Septach Melayn did not intend to permit him any sort of facile and cowardly escape.

  Varaile was waiting, though. Prestimion searched his mind for the right words—something that would bridge the immense gap between Coronal and subject that separated him from her now and transform this into a normal conversation between a man and a woman. Nothing came. He wondered if such a conversation would even be possible. He had no idea of what to say. He had been trained since boyhood to conduct himself effectively in any kind of diplomatic situation; but his training had not prepared him for anything like this. He stood before her mute and incapable.

  And in the end it was Varaile who rescued him. In the midst of his frozen silence her cool and formal pose of reverent deference began to give way, ever so subtly, to something warmer and less stiff: a hint of amusement in her eyes, the merest trace of a playful smile on her lips, a tacit affirmation that she saw the comic nature of their present predicament. That was all it took. Immediately there was that unquestionable current of connection running between them again, sudden, startling, intense.

  Prestimion felt a flood of relief and delight.

  It was difficult for him to maintain his own sternly regal posture while all of that was passing through him. He allowed a certain softening of his stance, a relaxation of his official face, and she took her cue from it. Quietly she said, looking straight into his eyes as she had not dared to do a moment before, and speaking in the most casual, informal tone, “You’re taller now than you were in Stee. Your eyes were on a level with mine, then.”

  It was a gigantic leap across the boundaries that separated them. And instantly, as though recoiling in consternation at her own boldness, she drew back with a little gasp, pressing her fingertips to her mouth. They were monarch and subject once again.

  Was that what he wanted? No. No. Absolutely not. So now it was Prestimion’s turn to put her at her ease, or the moment would be lost. “It’s these idiotic boots,” he said, smiling. “They’re supposed to make me look more imposing. You won’t ever see me in them again, I assure you.”

  At once the mischief was back in her eyes. “The boots, no. But will I ever see you again?”

  Septach Melayn, against the wall a dozen feet behind her, was nodding and beaming in delight.

  “Do you want to?” Prestimion asked.

  “Oh—my lord—oh, yes, my lord—”

  “There’s a place for you at court if you want it,” said Prestimion. “Septach Melayn will arrange for it. I’ll have to pay a visit to the Labyrinth soon, but perhaps we can dine together after I return to the Castle. I’d like to get to know you much better.”

  “That would give me great pleasure, my lord.” The tone this time was a mixture of formality and eagerness. A slight tremor in it betrayed her confusion. For all her innate poise, she had no real idea of how to handle what was unfolding now. But neither did he. Prestimion wondered what it was, exactly, that Septach Melayn had said to her about his intentions. He wondered, too, just what those intentions were.

  And this present conversation had gone on much too long. Septach Melayn was not the only one watching them now.

  “My lord?” she said, as he bade her a formal farewell and began to move away.

  “Yes, Varaile?”

  “My lord, was that really you, that time at our house in Stee?”

  “Do you have any doubt of that?”

  “And just why was it, may I ask, that you came?”

  “To meet you,” he said, and knew there would be no turning back from there.

  6

  The Labyrinth of Majipoor was a joyless place at best: a huge underground city, level upon level descending into the depths of the planet, with the hidden lair of the Pontifex at its deepest point, at the level farthest from the warming rays of the sun.

  Prestimion had experienced some of the blackest moments of his life here.

  It was in the great hall of the Labyrinth known as the Court of Thrones that Korsibar, in the moment of the announcement of the death of the Pontifex Prankipin, had carried out his astounding seizure of the starburst crown that was to have been Prestimion’s, right before Prestimion’s eyes and those of the highest figures of the realm.

  And it was in the suite of rooms set aside for the Coronal’s use at the Labyrinth that Prestimion had come before Korsibar’s father, Lord Confalume, who had now become the Pontifex Confalume, to demand of him the throne that Confalume had promised to him; and had heard from the bewildered and broken Confalume that nothing could be done, that the usurpation was an irrevocable act, that Korsibar was Coronal now and Prestimion must slink away to make whatever he could out of his life without further hope of attaining the throne. Confalume had wept, then, when Prestimion had pressed him to take action against this outrage—Confalume, weeping! But the Pontifex was paralyzed by fear. He dreaded a bloody civil war, which would certainly be the outcome of any challenge to Korsibar, too greatly to want to set himself in opposition to his son’s amazing and unlawful act. The thing is done, Confalume had said. Korsibar holds the power now.

  Well, the thing that had been done had now been undone, and Korsibar had been blotted from existen
ce as though he had never been, and Prestimion was Lord Prestimion now, returning in glory to this place from which he had crept away in shame and defeat. No one but he and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn knew anything of the dark events that had taken place in the subterranean metropolis in the days immediately after the death of the Pontifex Prankipin. But the Labyrinth was full of painful memories for him. If he could have avoided this journey, he would have. He had no wish to see the Labyrinth again until the day—let it be far in the future, he hoped!—when Confalume at last was dead and he himself must take up the title of Pontifex.

  Staying away from the Labyrinth entirely, though, was impossible. The new Coronal must present himself, early in the reign, to the Pontifex from whom he had received his throne.

  Here he was, then.

  Confalume awaited him.

  “Your journey was a pleasant one, I hope?”

  “Fair weather all the way, your majesty,” Prestimion said. “A good breeze carrying us southward down the Glayge.”

  They had had the introductory formalities, the embraces and the feasting, and now it was just the two of them together in quiet conversation, Pontifex and Coronal, emperor and king, nominal father and adoptive son.

  The river route was what Prestimion had taken to get here: the usual one for a lord of the Castle who was making a visit to the Labyrinth. He had traveled aboard the royal barge down the swift, wide Glayge, which rose in the foothills of the Mount and made its way south through some of the most fertile provinces of Alhanroel to the imperial capital. All along the river’s banks the populace had been assembled to cheer him on his way: at Storp and Mitripond, at Nimivan and Stangard Falls, Makroposopos and Pendiwane and the innumerable towns along the shores of Lake Roghoiz, and the cities of the Lower Glayge beyond the lake, Palaghat and Terabessa and Grevvin and all the rest. Prestimion had made this journey in reverse not many years before, returning from the Labyrinth to the Castle after the usurpation, and a far more somber trip it had been, too, with banners portraying the newly proclaimed Lord Korsibar fluttering in his face at every port. But that was then, and this was now, and as he went past each city the cry of “Prestimion! Prestimion! All hail Lord Prestimion!” echoed in his ears.

  There were seven entrances to the Labyrinth; but the one that Coronals used was the Mouth of Waters, where the Glayge flowed past the huge brown earthen mound that was the only part of the Labyrinth visible aboveground. Here, a line so sharp that a man could step across it in a single stride marked the division between the green and fertile Glayge Valley and the lifeless dusty desert in which the Labyrinth lay. Here Prestimion knew he must put behind him the sweet breezes and soft golden-green sunlight of the upper world and enter into the mysterious eternal night of the underground city, the sinister descending coils of its densely populated levels, the hermetic and airless-seeming realm far below that was the home of the Pontifex.

  Masked officials of the Pontificate were on hand to greet him at the entrance, with the Pontifex’s pompous white-haired cousin, Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, at the head of the group in his new capacity as High Spokesman to the Pontifex. The swift shaft reserved only for Powers of the Realm took Prestimion downward, past the circular levels where the Labyrinth’s teeming millions of population dwelled, those who served the Pontifical bureaucracy and those who simply performed the humble tasks of any great city, and onward to the deeper zones where the Labyrinth’s famed architectural wonders lay—the Pool of Dreams, the mysterious Hall of Winds, the bizarre Court of Pyramids, the Place of Masks, the inexplicable gigantic empty space that was the Arena, and all the rest—and with breathtaking swiftness delivered him to the imperial sector, and to the Pontifex. Who immediately dismissed his entire entourage from the room, even Oljebbin. Prestimion’s meeting would be with Confalume alone.

  Nor was the Confalume who faced him now the Confalume that Prestimion was expecting to see.

  He had feared that he would find the feeble ruined hulk of a man, the sorry and dismal remnant of the great Confalume of yore. The beginning of that collapse had already been in evidence at their last meeting. The Confalume with whom he had that fruitless, despondent meeting in the grim aftermath of the thunderbolt force of Korsibar’s power-grab, the man who had wept and trembled and begged most piteously to be left in peace, had been only a shadow of the Confalume whose forty-year reign as Coronal had been marked by triumph after triumph.

  Although the later obliteration of specific knowledge of the usurpation and the civil war that had ensued would have spared Confalume from the grief he felt over his son’s actions, there was no reason to think he would ever recover from the damage that had been inflicted on his spirit. Even at Prestimion’s coronation, with the whole Korsibar event now relegated to oblivion, Confalume had seemed little more than an empty shell, still physically strong but befuddled of mind, haunted by phantoms whose identity he could not begin to understand. And, according to Septach Melayn, who had met with the legate Vologaz Sar during Prestimion’s absence in the east-country, the Pontifex now was still a greatly troubled man, confused and depressed, plagued by sleeplessness and nebulous free-floating distress.

  And so Prestimion had thought that that charismatic Confalume of old surely would be gone, that he would meet a frail trembling man who stood at the edge of the grave. It was frightening to think that Confalume might not have much longer to live, for Prestimion himself had hardly commenced his own reign. He was far from ready to be pulled away from the Castle prematurely in order to immure himself in the dark pit that was the Labyrinth, although that was a risk that any Coronal faced when he succeeded one who had held his Castle throne as long as Confalume had.

  But it was a Confalume reborn and revivified to whom Prestimion presented himself now in the Court of Thrones, that hall of black stone walls rising to pointed arches where Pontifex and Coronal were meant to sit side by side on lofty seats—the very place in which Korsibar had staged his coup-d’etat. Here before him was Confalume, and he seemed to be the robust and forceful man Prestimion remembered from former days: jaunty and erect in the scarlet-and-black Pontifical robes, with a miniature replica of the ornate Pontifical tiara glittering bravely on one lapel and the little golden rohilla, the astrological amulet that he was so fond of wearing, mounted on the other. Nothing about him had the aspect of imminent death. When they embraced, it was impossible not to be impressed by the strength of the man.

  Confalume was himself again, rejuvenated, thriving. He had always been a man of tremendous physical vigor, not tall but powerfully built, with keen gray eyes and a full thick sweep of hair that had maintained its chestnut hue far into his later years. In any gathering at the Castle, the former Lord Confalume had automatically been the center of attention, not solely because he was Coronal, but because there emanated from him such personal magnetism, such a potent pull of inherent force, that you could not help but turn toward him. And clearly more than a vestige of that Confalume still remained. That innate vigor of his had pulled him through the crisis. Good, Prestimion thought. He felt a tide of immense relief go flooding through him. But at the same time he realized that he would be dealing now not with a shattered, weary old man to whom he could say whatever he thought most useful, but rather with one who had spent better than forty years on the Coronal’s throne, and who understood the wielding of high power better than anyone else in the world.

  “You look well, majesty. Remarkably well!”

  “You seem surprised, Prestimion.”

  “I had heard rumors of a troubled mood—restlessness, difficulty sleeping—”

  “Pah! Rumors, nothing more. Fables. I had a few hard moments at the beginning, perhaps. There’s a necessary period of adjustment, coming down from the Castle to live in this place, and I won’t pretend that that part’s easy. But it passes; and then you feel quite at home here.”

  “Do you, then?”

  “I do. And you should take comfort from it. There’s never been a Coronal yet who hasn’t been appa
lled by the necessity of moving along eventually to the Labyrinth. And why not? To wake each morning in the Castle, and look out at that great airy expanse all around, and to be able to descend from the Mount whenever you please to go wherever you like, Alaisor or Embolain or Ketheron if the whim takes you, or Pidruid or Narabal, for that matter—all the while knowing that one of these days the old emperor’s going to wake up dead, and when that happens they’re going to come for you and ship you down the Glayge to this place and point nine miles straight down and say, Here’s your new home, Lord So-and-So—” The Pontifex smiled. “Well, it’s not all that terrible to be here, let me assure you. It’s different. Restful.”

  “Restful?” That hardly seemed the word for this sunless cheerless place.

  “Oh, yes. There’s definitely something to say for the seclusion, for the peace and quiet of it. No one can even speak to you directly, you know, no one but your Spokesman and your Coronal. No pestilent petitioners plucking at your sleeve, no crowds of ambitious lordlings flocking around hoping for favors, no backbreaking journeys to undertake across thousands and thousands of miles because your Council has decided that it’s time to show your face in some distant province. No, Prestimion, you sit down here in your cozy underground palace, and they bring you legislation to read and you glance at it and say yes or no or maybe, and they take it away and you no longer have to give it a thought. You’re young and full of vitality, and you can’t begin to comprehend the merits of being sequestered in the Labyrinth. I admit that I felt the same way, thirty years ago. But you’ll see. Have yourself forty-odd years as Coronal, as I did, and I promise you you’ll be more than ready for the Labyrinth, and no anguish about it at all.”

  A forty-year reign as Coronal? Well, there was no probability of that, Prestimion knew. Confalume was past seventy already. A decade or so at the Castle was about the best the new Coronal could hope for, and then he would find himself Pontifex. But the older man seemed sincere in what he was saying, and there was great comfort in that.