Gently she took his hands in hers. Then she laced her fingers between his and tightened her grasp with sudden and surprising force.
It was like being struck in the forehead by a hammer.
He could no longer focus his eyes. Everything was blurred. He lurched backward and thought he might fall, but she held him upright, seemingly without effort. The room churned and wheeled about him: Varaile, his mother, the desk, the flower vases, everything in motion, swinging dizzyingly in wild orbits around his head. His mind was swirling as it would have been if he had put away five flasks of wine in half an hour.
Then came calmness again, a blessed moment of balance and stability, and he felt himself rising wraithlike from the floor, passing easily through one of the carved lacework openings in the ceiling, drifting upward and upward into the sky like an untethered balloon. It reminded him of the drug-vision he had had long ago in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, when by the use of magical herbs and the uttering of powerful Names he had risen beyond the kingdom of the clouds and looked down on Majipoor from the edge of space.
But the effect was very different now.
That other time he had viewed the world from on high with the cool objectivity of a god. He had seen the whole giant planet as nothing more than a little ball turning slowly in the sky, a toy model of a world, with its three continents standing out as dark wedges no bigger than one of his fingernails, and he had carefully taken that little ball upon the palm of his hand and, gently, curiously, touched it with his finger, examining it with fascination and love, all the while standing outside it, at a distant remove from the lives of its people.
Now, though, he was at one and the same time far above the world and inextricably enmeshed in the inner reality of what lay below him. He looked down upon it from on high and yet was intimately linked to the broiling, turbulent energies of its billions of people.
He perceived himself soaring at infinite speed through some region of the upper air, and in the darkness below the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor blazed like beacons, each distinct and easily identifiable: there was the immense Mount, with its Fifty Cities and its Six Rivers, there was the Castle clinging to the tip of that great rock and sprawling far down its sides, and there, limned in the same wondrous clarity, were Sisivondal and Sefarad and Sippulgar, Sintalmond, Kajith Kabulon, Pendiwane and Stoien and Alaisor, and all the rest of Alhanroel as well, and Zimroel’s cities just as clear, Ni-moya and Piliplok and Narabal and Dulorn and Khyntor and their many neighbors; and there was the Isle beneath him now, and Suvrael coming up to the south with cities he had not seen even in dreams, Tolaghai and Natu Gorvinu and Kheskh. He recognized each one now by sight, intuitively, as though they bore labels.
But also it seemed to him that he was traveling just above the rooftops of all these places, so close that he could touch the souls of their inhabitants the way he had touched the little turning ball of the world that time in Triggoin.
Potent psychic emanations were coming upward to him like heat out of a chimney, and what he felt was terrifying. No protective membrane separated him from the lives of the swarming billions of people who lived in those cities. Everything reached him in a mighty rush. He felt the outcries that told of pain and sorrow and utter despair; he felt the anguish of souls so isolated from their fellow beings that they might well have been encased in blocks of ice; he felt the bewildered throb of minds that moved in fifty directions at once and therefore could not move at all. He felt the stabbing agony of those who were struggling to make sense of their own thoughts and failed to comprehend. He felt the nightmare dread of those who looked into their minds to find their own pasts, and discovered only gaping canyons.
Over and over he experienced the terror that inner anarchy brings. He felt the desperate turbulence of the wounded spirit. He felt the horror of heart-blindness and the shame of heart-deadness. He felt the bleakness of irrevocable loss.
He felt chaos everywhere.
Chaos.
Chaos.
Chaos.
Madness.
Madness, yes, an irresistible river of it, spilling out across the land like some hideous tide of sewage set free. A great blight, an overwhelming unstoppable disaster, a juggernaut of calamitous pandemonium wheeling through the world, a scourge far greater in scope than anything he had imagined.
“Mother—” he gasped. “Mother!”
“Drink this,” Varaile said softly, and offered him a goblet. “Water, that’s all it is. Just water.”
His eyes fluttered open. He was, he saw, seated on the couch in his mother’s study, leaning back against the pillow. The white robe they had given him to wear was drenched with perspiration, and he was trembling. He gulped the water. It made him shiver. Varaile touched her hand lightly to his forehead: her fingers felt cold as ice against his feverish brow. He saw his mother across the room, standing with arms folded beside her desk, watching him calmly.
She said, “Don’t worry, Prestimion. The effects will pass in another moment or two.”
“I fainted, didn’t I?”
“You lost consciousness. You didn’t actually fall, though.”
“Here. Take this back,” he said, reaching for the silver circlet. But it was already gone from his forehead. He shuddered. “What a nightmare it was, mother!”
“Yes. A nightmare. I see these things every day. I have for months, now. So have the people of my staff. This is what the world has become, Prestimion.”
“All of it?”
She smiled. “Not all, no, not yet. Much is still healthy. What you felt was the pain of those who were most vulnerable to the plague, the first victims, the ones who had no way of defending themselves against the attack that came in the night. Their cries are the ones that rise to find me as I move through the night above them. What dreams can I send, do you think, that can heal such pain as that?”
He was silent. He had no answer to that. He had never, so it seemed to him then, felt such despair in his life: not even in the moment when Korsibar had seized the crown that he and everyone else had expected to go to him.
I have destroyed the world, he thought.
Looking toward Varaile, he said, “Do you have any idea of what I was experiencing when I was wearing that thing?”
“Some. It must have been very bad. The look on your face—that stunned, terrible expression—”
“Your father is one of the lucky ones,” he said. “He isn’t able to comprehend what’s happened to him. At least I hope he can’t.”
“You were looking right into people’s minds?”
“Not into individual ones, no. At least, it didn’t seem that way. It isn’t possible, I think, to see into individual minds. What you get is general impressions, broad waves of sensation, the aggregate of what must be hundreds of minds all at once.”
“Thousands,” the Lady said.
She was studying him very closely, he realized, from her place across the room. Her gaze was warm and compassionate and motherly, but it was a penetrating one, also, cutting deep into the interior of his soul.
After a while she said, very quietly, “Tell me what has occurred, Prestimion, that has brought this thing about.”
She knows, he thought.
There can be no doubt of that. She knows. Not the details, but the essence. That I am somehow responsible, that some action of mine is at the bottom of all this.
And she was waiting now to learn the rest of it. It was clear to him that he could hide it from her no longer. She wanted a confession from him; and he was willing, now—eager, even—to pour it all forth.
What about Varaile, though? He cast an uncertain glance toward her. Should he ask her to leave? Could he say what he had to say in front of her, and thus make her a party to his own immense crime? I am the one responsible, he would have to say, for what has happened to your father, Varaile. Did he dare tell her that?
Yes, he thought.
Yes, I do. She is my wife. I will have no secrets
from her, king of the world though I be.
Slowly, carefully, Prestimion said, “It is all my doing, mother. I think you already know that, but I admit it all the same: I am the cause of the catastrophe, I alone. It was never my intention to make such a thing happen, but I did, and the guilt is entirely mine.”
He heard Varaile inhale sharply in astonishment and bewilderment. His mother, watching him as calmly and keenly as before, said nothing. She was waiting for the rest.
“I will explain it from the beginning,” he said.
The Lady, still silent, nodded.
Prestimion closed his eyes a moment, steadying himself. Begin at the beginning, yes. But where was the beginning?
The obliteration first, the reasons for it afterward, he thought. Yes.
He took a deep breath and plunged in. “The course of recent world events that you think you know is not the one that the world actually followed,” he said. “A vast deception has taken place. Great things have happened, things unprecedented in the history of the world, and no one knows of them. Thousands have died, and the reasons for their deaths have been concealed. The truth has been blotted out and we have all been living a lie, and only a handful of people are aware of the real story—Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, Abrigant, two or three others. None besides those. I offer it now to you; but you will see, I hope, that it must not go beyond you.”
He paused. Looked toward his mother, and then to Varaile. They still did not speak. Their expressions were unreadable, remote. They were waiting to hear what he had to say.
“You, mother: you had four sons, and one is dead, Taradath, who was so very clever, a poet, one who loved to play games with words. You think he died while swimming in one of the rivers of the north-country. Not so: he died by drowning, yes, but it was in the course of a terrible battle along the River Iyann, when the Mavestoi Dam broke. Does that startle you? It is the truth: that is how Taradath died. But you have believed a lie all this time, and I am responsible for that.”
Her only reaction was the merest flicker of the corner of her mouth. Her self-control astounded him. Varaile simply looked mystified.
“To continue: Lord Confalume had two children also. Twins, a son and a daughter. I see you look surprised at that. Yes, the children of Confalume are unknown today, and I am accountable also for that. The daughter’s name was Thismet: she was small, delicate, very beautiful, an extremely complex woman full of great ambition. She took after her mother Roxivail, I think. As for the son, he was strong and handsome, a tall, dark-haired man of lordly bearing, an athlete, a skilled hunter. Not particularly intelligent, I must say. A simple soul, but good-hearted, in his fashion. His name was Korsibar.”
From Varaile came a little cry of surprise as he spoke that name. Prestimion was puzzled by her reaction; but he chose not to interrupt the flow of his story to ask for an explanation. The Lady Therissa seemed far away, lost in thought.
“The Pontifex Prankipin grew ill,” Prestimion said. “Lord Confalume, contemplating the imminent change of Powers, fastened upon me as the one to follow him as Coronal. He said nothing publicly about that, of course, while Prankipin still lived. We gathered at the Labyrinth, all the lords and princes of the realm, to await the Pontifex’s death. And in that time of waiting certain villainous folk came to Prince Korsibar and whispered in his ear: ‘You are the Coronal’s son, and you are a great princely man. Why should little Prestimion be Coronal when your father becomes Pontifex? Take the throne for yourself, Korsibar! Take it! Take it!’ Two scoundrelly brothers, Farholt and Farquanor, were among those who urged him most strongly in that: they are forgotten now too, and good riddance. Another conspirator was a Su-Suheris magus, chilly and evil. And there was also the Lady Thismet, the most powerful influence of all. They pushed, and Korsibar was too weak and simple to resist. He had never imagined himself as Coronal. But now they made him think that the throne was his due. The old Pontifex died; and we gathered in the Court of Thrones for the passing of the crown, and Korsibar’s magus cast a spell to cloud our minds, and when we were ourselves again we saw Korsibar sitting beside his father on the double throne, and the starburst crown was on Korsibar’s head and Confalume, who had had a spell of acquiescence placed upon him, took no steps to halt his son’s seizure of power.”
“This is not easy to believe,” said the Lady Therissa.
“Believe it, mother. Oh, I urge you, believe it. It happened.”
Speaking rapidly now, Prestimion sketched an account of the civil war for them. Korsibar’s proclamation of power and his own refusal to accept the takeover. The new Coronal’s naive invitation to Prestimion to take a seat on the Council, which was also refused, and with such anger and contempt that Korsibar had had him arrested and chained up in the Sangamor tunnels. His release from the tunnels through a compromise engineered by the tricky Dantirya Sambail, who hoped to play Korsibar and Prestimion off against each other to his own advantage; his raising of an army to challenge the illegal ascent of Korsibar to the throne; the first battle, outside the foothill city of Arkilon, which ended in a defeat for Prestimion’s rebel forces at the hands of Korsibar’s general Navigorn; the retreat into central Alhanroel, and a great victory for Prestimion over Navigorn at the Jhelum River; other battles, victories and defeats, his long march northwestward across Alhanroel with the armies of Korsibar in steady pursuit. And then the great disaster in the valley of the Iyann, when Dantirya Sambail, who now had allied himself with Korsibar, persuaded the usurper to blow up the Mavestoi Dam and bring the entire reservoir down on Prestimion’s forces.
“That was when Taradath died, mother, and many another loyal comrade with him, and all the valley was flooded. I was swept away by the waters myself, but managed somehow to swim to safety, and made my way northward into the Valmambra Desert, alone, and nearly died. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys found me there, and Duke Svor, whom you may remember; and the four of us went on to Triggoin, where we spent some months in hiding among the sorcerers, and I learned a few of their skills.” Prestimion smiled an oblique smile. “My tutor was Gominik Halvor. That was the beginning of my alliance with him and with his son Heszmon Gorse.”
Again Prestimion paused. His mother looked very pale. She was plainly much shaken by all this, and struggling hard to encompass it with her mind. Varaile did not even appear to be trying. Most of these names and places were unfamiliar to her; the tale was incomprehensible; she seemed utterly lost.
He moved on now to the climax of his story. He told of how in Triggoin he had come close to despair, but had undertaken a visionary quest in which he had seen that it was his destiny to overthrow Korsibar and heal the world. He described his coming-forth from Triggoin, his gathering of a new army at Gloyn in west-central Alhanroel, his march eastward toward Castle Mount, culminating in the great final battle against Korsibar and his forces at Thegomar Edge.
Prestimion said nothing of Thismet’s decision to change sides; nor of her coming before him in his camp at Gloyn and offering herself to him as his wife—and his consort, once he had attained the throne. He had sworn to have no secrets from Varaile; but here, now, as the episode of his love for Thismet and hers for him reached its proper place in the narrative, he could not bring himself to tell of it. What purpose would be served? It was something that had happened and then had been unhappened, and it had no bearing now on anything pertaining to the present condition of the world: a purely private interlude, buried now in unhistory. Let it remain there, Prestimion thought. The only thing that was important just now was to render an unvarnished account of the events at Thegomar Edge.
“They had the high position,” Prestimion said. “We were down below, in a marshy place called Beldak. At first the battle went against us; but as we retreated, Korsibar’s infantry foolishly came down the hill to give us chase, and once they broke their formation, we were able to bring reinforcements in from the side and catch them between two fronts. The tide turned in our favor. It was then that I deployed the mages who were my u
ltimate weapon.”
“Mages, Prestimion?” said the Lady Therissa. “You?”
“The fate of the world was at stake, mother. I was resolved to use any force I could to bring Korsibar’s reign to an end. Gominik Halvor and his son came forth, and a dozen more of the high wizards of Triggoin with them, and they cast a spell that turned bright noon into moonless night, and in the darkness we destroyed the usurper’s army. Korsibar was killed by his own magus, the Su-Suheris Sanibak-Thastimoon. The magus slew the Lady Thismet also, and then lost his life to Septach Melayn. Dantirya Sambail, who had fought against us that day, found me in the confusion and offered to fight me for the throne; but I defeated him and had him put under arrest. Then Navigorn came to me to surrender, and the war was over. The good Earl Kamba, who taught me the art of the bow, died that day, and Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and my dear little sly Duke Svor, and many another great lord, but the war was over, and I was Coronal at last.”
He looked toward his mother. The full impact of the story had reached her now. She was stunned into silence.
Then she said, gathering herself a little, “This truly happened, Prestimion? It seems more like some fantastic tale out of some ancient epic poem. The Book of Changes, it could be.”
“This truly happened,” he said. “All of it.”
“If that is so, then why is it that we know nothing of it?”
“Because,” he said, “I stole it from your minds.” And told them then the last of the story: how he stood amidst the dead at Thegomar Edge feeling no joy for his victory, but only grief at the sundering of the world, the irreparable division into two irreconcilable factions. For how could those who had fought for Korsibar, and seen their comrades die for him, accept the rule of Prestimion now? And how could he forgive those who had turned against him, often treacherously, as Prince Serithorn had, and Duke Oljebbin, and Admiral Gonivaul, and Dantirya Sambail, after pledging their support? What, also, of the surviving kin of those who had perished in those bloody battles? Would they not hold grudges against the victorious faction forever? “The war,” Prestimion said, “had left a scar upon the world. No, worse: a wound that could never heal. But suddenly I saw a way of repairing the irreparable, of healing the unhealable.”