Palaghat was far from grand, not a patch on the least splendid of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount. But in its provincial way it was a decent pretty place, high white terraces along its riverfront side, luxuriant greenery, a sturdy city wall fashioned of pink granite blocks, with a great abundance of ornamental parapets and embrasures and crenellations and machicolations, and heraldic dragons and great-horned gabalungs delineated along its face in gold and lapis lazuli.
The mayor of the city was Ildikar Weng, a plump, perspiring, red-faced, thick-lipped man with an absurd continuous fringe of curling golden hair all about his head and cheeks and chin. He sat beside Korsibar during the floater ride uphill from the harbor to the hostelry that had been set aside for the royal party, his gaze trained unwaveringly on the Coronal in a look of utter admiration and servile regard, while at the same time he waved and nodded constantly to the people flanking the road as though their cheers were directed not to Lord Korsibar but to him.
In an unending flow of babbling chatter the mayor labored to demonstrate to Korsibar that he was a man comfortable in the company of Coronals as well as lesser lords—sprinkling his conversation with reminiscences of the visits that other grandees had made to Palaghat during his administration, with much talk along the lines of how “the magnificent Lord Confalume your father always preferred a certain wine, that I will gladly provide also for you,” and that “we have always found it a time of special pleasure when the High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin is in Palaghat,” and “as I said to the Grand Admiral, when he questioned me about a certain rare fish of these waters that was very much to his taste—” Ildikar Weng boasted even of a visit from the late Pontifex, for Prankipin had been given to leaving the Labyrinth occasionally, at least to travel as far as here, though not in many years.
Korsibar found his patience quickly ebbing. Was this what it meant to be Coronal, to listen to the prattle of fools such as this, wherever he might go from this day forward?
He forced himself to listen politely enough, for a time. But then the mayor went too far. “And then,” Ildikar Weng said, “two years past we enjoyed a visit from the splendid and charming Prince Prestimion, in which the prince said, as I remember it—”
“Spare us what the splendid and charming prince said, if you will,” said Korsibar untenderly, with an imprecation under his breath.
Ildikar Weng turned pale at the Coronal’s rough tone, and then a moment later flushed bright red. He blinked and goggled at Korsibar.
“Lordship? Have I given offense in some way?”
“If it is offensive that we are required to hear anecdotes about every petty idiot of a Castle lordling who’s ever belched or puked at one of your dreary feasts, yes, you have given offense. Do you think our ear never grows weary of this kind of noise being poured into it?”
“Lordship, lordship, lordship!” the mayor cried, flinging his hands about in the air. He was so agitated that he seemed on the verge of tumbling out of the open-topped floater. “I meant no harm, lordship! A thousand pardons! A hundred thousand! I understood Prince Prestimion to be your dear friend, and so I thought you would want to hear—” Korsibar stared at him even more stonily. Ildikar Weng’s eyes bulged with horror. He let his voice trickle off into silence. He seemed about to weep.
Korsibar saw that he had been too hard. But what now? Apologize? Offer soothing reassurances that no offense had been given or taken? A Coronal could hardly apologize; and, if he did, it would only guarantee a fresh torrent of this stuff in the mile or so that remained before they reached their destination.
Thismet, who was seated on the mayor’s far side, rescued the moment by saying, “His lordship is very weary now, good sir mayor, and perhaps would prefer to be left in silence for a time. He was awake far into the night signing decrees and papers of appointment, and you know what heavy toil that can be, especially at the beginning of a term of office.”
“I am covered in shame for my thoughtlessness.”
“No need. But speak with me instead, for now. Tell me: these handsome palm trees by the side of the road, with the red trunks? Something similar, I think, grows in Lord Havilbove’s garden, by Tolingar Barrier on Castle Mount.”
“It is the very same tree, lady, whose seeds we were given in Lord Tharamond’s time,” said Ildikar Weng, and he launched into a lengthy disquisition on how and why the seeds had been obtained, and what difficulties of culture had been met with in the process of establishing them here in Paraghat. Korsibar, in great relief, sat back against his soft cushion of crimson leather and let himself slip into a dozing trance, thinking of nothing very much at all, as the shouts of “Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!” blew past him on the breeze that rose from the river.
And then they were at the guest-palace, and he was alone in his room at last. The royal suite was altogether worthy of a king, five grand rooms with glistening walls of green jasper lightly dotted with bloodred spots, and draperies of Gemmelthrave weave, so fine that spiders might have done it, framing the great windows through which a spectacular view of the city, the port, and the river could be had.
This was his chance to slip out of his clothes for a time, and bathe and rest before the inevitable banqueting and speechifying was begun. He was wearing a white stole of steetmoy fur over a green doublet, the Coronal’s usual colors; but there had been no time for proper tailoring, and the costume was ill-fitting, and too heavy for this summer day besides. Lifting the stole from his shoulders, he set it aside on a wooden rack, thinking that he would have few enough chances to dress and undress himself once he was at the Castle, with myriad royal servitors attending him constantly.
As Korsibar began to undo the lacings of his doublet, his eye fell upon a mirror beside the bed, and he paused to study his features in it, searching to see whether he had taken on the full commanding lineaments of royalty yet. To be a successful king, he knew, it was important as a bare minimum at least to look like along. His father, though not a man of grand stature, had that look. It had often been said of Lord Confalume that a visitor from another planet could appear in a crowded reception at the court, and he would know at once which man in the throng was the Coronal, whether or not Lord Confalume had bothered to wear his crown that day.
Of course, the crown helped. Korsibar moved it slightly, straightening it, for it had become somewhat atilt during the ride from the harbor.
Thismet’s voice came from behind him suddenly: “You like the look of it, do you, brother? But you should take it off and let it rest from time to time, don’t you think?”
“And you should knock before entering the Coronal’s chambers, even if he is your own twin brother.”
“Ah, but I did knock, twice. You were so busy admiring yourself that you didn’t hear, I suppose. And when I got no answer, I thought I would come in. Or shall we have shame between us now that you are king, that never existed between us before?”
Korsibar took off the crown and laid it on the bed.
“Perhaps I wear it too much,” he said with a grin. “But I’m not yet so much at home in it that I like to be without it.”
“Father wore it only now and then.”
“Father was Coronal for twice as many years as either of us has been alive, Thismet. Let me be king six months, at least, before I begin taking this crown for granted.”
“As you wish, my lord,” Thismet said with a gesture of exaggerated submissiveness. She came to his side, looking up at him far above her with excited glowing eyes and taking hold of him by both his wrists, and said, “Oh, Korsibar, Korsibar, do you believe it yet?”
“Only some of the time.”
“The same for me. Lord Korsibar! Coronal Lord of Majipoor! How easy it all was! Oh, we will put our mark on this world, won’t we, you and I! We will do such marvelous things, Korsibar, now that all this has been given into our hands!”
“So we will, sister.”
“But you must take care not to be so haughty, brother.”
“Haughty, am I?”
“You were very cruel to that fat red-faced mayor.”
“He chewed too long on my ear, with his tales of playing host to father, and Prankipin, and Oljebbin, and this one and that one, and finally Prestimion—ah, that was too much, mentioning Prestimion!”
“He thought you loved Prestimion.”
“Certainly I hold no hatred for him, and never have. But to throw his name at me just then—what slyness was meant there, what hidden implication?”
“None, I think.”
“When it was known everywhere that Prestimion was to have been the next Coronal?”
“No,” Thismet said. She lifted her hand and ticked off points on her fingers. “One, what is known everywhere at the Castle is not necessarily general knowledge in the valley of the Lower Glayge. Two, there’s no reason in the universe for the mayor to be sly and mocking with you about Prestimion. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain from such mockery. Three, the mayor’s much too stupid to have any hidden motives at all. And four—pay attention to me, brother!—four, kings must be tolerant of having their ears chewed by fools, because every fool in the kingdom will try to do it, and some will of necessity succeed. Your father didn’t win the love of the world’s people by snarling and snapping at them. No great Coronal ever has. I want you to be a great Coronal, Korsibar.”
“And so I will be.”
“Well, then,” she said. “Suffer fools more gladly. The Divine made millions and millions of them, and gave you to them to be their king.”
She made the starburst at him again, more sincerely than before, and kissed the tips of her fingers to him and went from the room.
* * *
He enjoyed two hours’ respite before his duties came seeking him again. Hardly had he bathed and dressed when Oljebbin came to see him with some papers that had to be signed and dispatched to the Castle, which he did without reading them, for Oljebbin said they were only matters of routine. And then it was Farholt, who had brought plans with him for the seating arrangements at that evening’s municipal banquet in his honor; and after Farholt, Farquanor, who lingered for a time, once more irritatingly angling for the High Counsellorship by indirection and innuendo, so that Korsibar wanted to cry out to him in fury to be gone. Then came Dantirya Sambail, who had heard a crude foul joke about Prestimion and Septach Melayn and felt the need of sharing it with the Coronal that very minute.
In the afternoon, Korsibar held court in the garden of the guest-palace—doing without his crown this time, just to see what it was like to leave it off, whether he would still feel fully royal without it—and received homage from a delegation of landowners and great farmers from the surrounding countryside. Then he had a little while to enjoy a quiet drink in his rooms with Mandrykarn and Venta and a few other intimate friends, and after that it was time for the banquet, and too much heavy wine and too much rich food, piles of stewed vegetables and great slabs of some pale meat marinated in spicy wine and sweetened thereafter by jujuga-fruit, and then an elaborately diplomatic speech by the very much chastened Mayor Ildikar Weng that mentioned Prankipin and Confalume and other previous distinguished visitors to Paraghat not at all, and dwelled with inordinate optimism on the grand achievements that the Coronal Lord Korsibar would accomplish. To which Korsibar responded courteously enough, though briefly. He left the main task of speaking to Gonivaul and Oljebbin and Farquanor, all of whom spoke in artfully empty words of the great things that the new regime proposed to bring about and the wonderful benefits that would surely accrue for the citizens of the district of the Lower Glayge Valley.
No speaker failed to mention the new star that had come into the sky the night before. “Lord Korsibar’s star,” they called it. All hailed it as a sign of the greatness of the hour, the bright promise of the wondrous new era now commencing. Afterward, when they gathered for a time under the night sky before retiring to their rooms, Korsibar looked toward it again and again, fixing his eyes on its brightness and thinking, Lord Korsibar’s star. Lord Korsibar’s star. And was flooded once more with a sense of the grandness of the destiny that had swept him to this high place, and would carry him onward through all his life as Coronal, past whatever obstacle he might be called upon to face.
During the night, Korsibar had a sending of the Lady, the first such that he had had in many years.
It was rare for the Lady to direct her attention to princes of the Mount. Her chief responsibility was to the ordinary citizens, who looked to her sendings for comfort and guidance. But she came to him now. The moment he closed his eyes, Korsibar felt himself drawn downward into a vortex of swirling blue with an eye of gold at its farther end; he knew that resistance was futile, and he let himself drift freely, passing through that golden eye into a place of mist and shadow.
The Lady Kunigarda was in that place, which was the octagonal chamber with walls of white stone that lay at the center of her dwelling at Inner Temple, atop the highest terrace of the Isle of Sleep. She was strolling by the eight-sided pool in the middle of that chamber: a woman of advanced years, strikingly like her brother Confalume in appearance, strong-featured, with gray eyes set far apart and broad cheekbones and a wide, commanding mouth.
He knew her at once. His father’s elder sister, she was, who had been elevated to the rank of Lady of the Isle when Korsibar and Thismet were still small children, and whose reign as a Power of Majipoor must now end with the coming of the new regime. He had met her only three times in his life. She was a person of formidable strength and determination, every bit as regal as her royal brother Confalume.
She stared at him now through veils of dream with some severity in her gaze and said, “You sleep in the bed of a king, Korsibar. Tell me, how is that?”
“I am a king, Lady,” he replied, using the voice of dreams that he had been taught to use in childhood. “Did you see my star? It’s a king’s star. Lord Korsibar’s star.”
“Yes,” she said. “Lord Korsibar’s star. I have seen it too, Korsibar.” And began to speak of its coming, and of him, and his sister also, and of his father the newly made Pontifex, and of the comings and goings of Coronals and Pontifexes across thousands of years, and of many other things. But there were such twists and turns in the pattern of her long discourse that Korsibar could barely grasp the logic of her words with his sleeping mind, and then was unable to follow it at all. She seemed to be speaking always of two or three contradictory things at once, so that every sentence had its own antithesis and cancellation buried somewhere within it and would not let him discern any thread running consistently from front to back.
Then she stopped and gave him along cool steady look and was gone, leaving him staring into an empty room; and moments later he awoke, confused and troubled. It seemed to Korsibar that the stern old woman’s presence was still resonating in his soul, like the afterclamor of a great bell once the bell itself has ceased tolling. He struggled to wring some sense from the dream, attempting to retrace in his mind the tortuous path that her words had taken.
She had acknowledged him as legitimate Coronal, he was sure of that, for she had referred to him several times as Lord Korsibar, had she not, and to Confalume as Pontifex? On the other hand she had made reference once to his father as a “prisoner.” The prisoner of the Labyrinth, as the Pontifex was sometimes said to be, or the prisoner of recent events? The meaning was ambiguous. There were other ambiguities too, blurry and indeterminate fragments of augury, possibly implying coming hardships and reverses. But hardships and reverses for whom? Was she talking about Prestimion, who had already experienced them, or about him, or about someone else entirely?
The dream left Korsibar frightened and uneasy. Though he could not say why, because he had understood so little of it, it seemed to open mysterious abysses of dark possibility for him, harbingers of a transformation of his fortunes for the worse; here at the summit of Majipoor, the only direction he could go now was downward, and as he reflected on the dream, it seemed to him that it was warning him of trou
blesome shoals ahead. But was that so, or was he merely giving way to a sudden spate of doubt to balance his supreme success? He did not know. It was so long since he had paid attention to a dream of any sort, or had consulted a dream-speaker to help him understand one, that he had forgotten whatever he might once have known of the technique of interpreting them.
He toyed with the idea of calling in Sanibak-Thastimoon and asking for a speaking of the dream. But he realized that the details of it were fleeing so rapidly from his mind that there would soon be nothing for the Su-Suheris to work with. And gradually the discomfort went from him.
The dream is a good omen, he told himself firmly, upon some further reflection when morning came.
It means that the Lady Kunigarda recognizes my ascendancy, and will lend me her hand in these the early days of my reign.
Yes. Yes. A good omen, definitely a good omen.
Yes. Yes!
“Did you sleep well, brother?” Thismet asked him at breakfast.
“I had a sending of the Lady,” he said. She looked at him in sudden alarm; and, farther down the long table, the heavy domed head of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail turned his way also, with an expression of deep interest Korsibar smiled. “All is well,” he said calmly. “The Lady gave me assurances of her love and full support. We will flourish and prevail: there is no doubt of that, none whatever.”
5
MIDSUMMER EVE, a magical night, the sun high in the sky far into the evening watch, the Great Moon and two of the smaller ones shining brightly as well, and in the loftiest vault of the heavens the three immense red stars that formed the buckle of the constellation known as Cantimpreil plainly visible despite the competing radiance of sun and moons. The new star was there too, the fierce white one burning blue through all the competing illumination, the star that Svor had prophesied was the star of good omen for Prestimion’s cause.