Svor cried, in a ragged voice, “They’re blowing up the dam, Prestimion! They’ll send the whole lake down on us!”
“But that would flood a hundred villages and—” Prestimion replied, and said no more after that, but only gaped in disbelief, for by the lurid light of the explosions above them he could see the whole face of the dam crumbling, and a stupefying torrent of water descending through the darkness toward the valley below and all his men.
1
THIS WAS SURELY the bleakest place in all the world, Prestimion thought, save only those terrible deserts of the continent of Suvrael where no one in his right mind would ever want to go.
It was a gray land that he was walking through in this black hour. The sky overhead was gray, the dry ground beneath his feet was gray, the very wind was gray with a burden of fine silt as it swept roaring out of the east. The only color in this place came from the plants, which seemed to be striking back against the universal grayness with some furious determination of their own. Big rigid dome-shaped fungi, a deathly yellow in hue, exploded into clouds of brilliant green spores whenever he trampled on one; the tough sparse saw-edged grass was an angry carmine; the trees, tall and narrow as spears, had gleaming blue leaves shaped like spines and constantly dropped a rain of viscous pink sap that burned him like acid whenever he passed incautiously within reach of it.
Low chalky hills that had the look of stubby teeth formed chains across the far horizon. The open country between them was flat and dry and unpromising, no lakes, no streams, only an occasional brackish spring oozing out of some salt-encrusted crack in the ground.
He had been walking for days, so many that he lost count of them. His tongue was thick and swollen from thirst and his eyelids were so puffed that he looked out between them as if through slitted windows. Sweat streamed on him constantly; caked dust clung everywhere to his sticky skin; the force of the sun became a metallic clangor sounding in his head. And through his mind ran, over and over without cease, the remembered images of the cataclysm that had destroyed his army and, for all he knew, robbed him of his dearest friends.
That merciless white wall of water riding down the hillside toward them, with the great sundered chunks of Mavestoi Dam coming down with it—
The terrified mounts bucking and rearing—scattering in every direction—the infantrymen desperately running, seeking high ground—screams in the night—the sound of that falling water, the inexorable sound of it, like the Great Moon itself rushing down upon them through the air to crush them all—
Prestimion had scarcely any recollection of how he himself had managed to survive the destruction of the dam. He remembered the first tongue of foaming water swirling along the ground toward him clearly enough, and remembered too the greater rush of water behind it. His mount struggling to stay upright and failing, pitching over, kicking frantically in the sudden lake that had begun to engulf it. Then his memories were unclear for a time. He knew he had been unable to right the animal or to steady it in any way, and that eventually he was swept out of the saddle and away from the sinking mount by the force of the water. And then—swimming? Yes, he must have made his way somehow across the breast of the rising flood, through all the turbulence of it, great masses of water constantly falling on him like boulders and smashing him under. Being hurled down deep, his lungs filling, and fighting his way up again, again, again. But he had no memory of that at all. Remembered, only, emerging at last onto dry land, crawling up on some rocky outcropping that must have been, an hour earlier, part of the cliff below the dam, and lying there for an endless time, gasping and puking, fighting for breath, sick and dizzy from all the water he had gulped down.
Then—Korsibar’s men coming down into the flood zone, seeking out the dazed survivors, slaughtering them like pigs.
He had no idea how he had escaped that. His weapons had all been lost in the water. Perhaps he had found safety under some overhanging ledge, or behind some bush. All he remembered was that he had come through it alive, somehow. Making his way from the battle scene, from that place along the water’s edge where shouting warriors ran about, where the figures of dead or gravely wounded men lay strewn across the land like straws.
That was not the first time Prestimion had beheld that grim landscape of death. He had seen it once before, he knew: long ago in Muldemar House, in the pleasant peace and privacy of his mother’s reading-gallery, that time when the magus Galbifond had had him look into a bowl of some pallid fluid. Galbifond had muttered incantations and shown him that very battlefield, that same scene of frightful chaos. Prestimion had not known, then, whose armies contended there: but now it was clear that one was Korsibar’s and the other his, and that Korsibar by working a monstrously evil deed had been the victor.
But he himself had survived the flood and the debacle that followed it. In the eye of his mind he saw himself limping away from the battlefield where nothing now remained but the evidence of disaster. Coming forth at last into a quieter place where no one was in sight anywhere, neither friend nor foe. Climbing some steep rocky path that took him upward along the course of the river, past the shattered dam, past the palisades of Korsibar’s encampment.
Alone, as the dreadful dawn after that dreadful night had arrived, Prestimion had looked down and behind hhn, thinking, Taradath? Abrigant? And thinking then, also: Svor? Gialaurys? Septach Melayn?
Why had he ever wanted to be Coronal? Had he not been happy enough as Prince of Muldemar? Two of his brothers almost certainly dead, his three dear friends swept away in that deluge, the lives lost of thousands of men who had supported his cause, and for what? For what? So that he might sit upon a great ruby-streaked block of black opal instead of some other man, and have people kneel and make inane gesticulations before him, and listen solemnly as he issued decrees?
He was numbed, stunned, by the death and destruction that his determination to wrest the crown from Korsibar had caused. How many had perished for his sake? His overweening ambition had made martyrs of thousands of good people. Majipoor had never been a warlike world; since the pacification of the Shapeshifters seven thousand years before, its people had lived placidly, in happy harmony, and those who were of a warring nature could find release on the jousting-fields and other such rough sports. But now, behold! Because of his determination that he and not the other man should rule, war had come to the world, and men were in their graves who should have had long lives ahead.
Now there was nothing left for him but to march onward into this unknown country in the hope of avoiding the fury of Korsibar’s men, and reach some safe place where he might rest and recover himself, and then he would consider how he meant to spend whatever time might remain to him in the world.
In the days that followed, and for days after that, roots and leaves and little white acrid fruits were the only food Prestimion had. Then at last, on the far side of the chalky hills, the country changed a little, the land becoming pale brown streaked with red: a sign, perhaps, of fertihity. There was a grayish silty little river running here from east to west that was split into three forks. Along the riverbanks the plants had shining green foliage, and some of them carried fat purplish fruits with wrinided skins. Prestimion tried one and it did him no harm, so he ate several others before sleeping, and when he found himself still alive and unpoisoned in the morning, he had some more, and collected others to carry with him in a fold of his jerkin.
This was a harsh untamed land. He had no idea what it was called. Danger lurked everywhere. He stumbled across some loose boughs and nearly fell, and when he caught his balance he looked down and saw himself at the verge of a pit, with glittering red eyes and flashing yellow claws waiting below. Later in the day a long swaybacked beast covered in thick brown scales that looked as hard as rock rushed wildly out of nowhere, swinging its small dull-eyed head from side to side like a club; but it went running past him as though in search of juicier prey. And afterward he saw a comic hopping creature with merry golden eyes and absurd tiny fore
arms, but from its tail there sprang a spike that squirted poison into the plump gray lizards that it hunted. A day or two later came a swarm of winged insects, as dazzling as colored jewels, that filled the air with a milky spray, and when a bird flew into that deadly mist it let its wings droop and plummeted ground-ward like a stone.
Farther on the terrain changed again. Now it was broken land, cut by gullies and steep canyons. The bones of the world lay exposed here, great dark stripes cutting through the soft reddish rocks of the hillsides. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. There were great trees with thick black trunks and widespreading crowns of yellow leaves.
And there was a village here, in a sheltered place at the floor of a narrow canyon. The people were all Ghayrogs, the gray-scaled reptilian-looking folk with forked, flickering scarlet tongues. There were a few hundred of them, living widely scattered up and down the canyon along a stretch a couple of miles long. This dry country seemed to be what they liked: Ghayrogs often settled in inhospitable parts of Majipoor that reminded them of their home districts on their native world.
They were friendly enough here. They gave Prestimion a place to sleep, and food that was edible enough, though strange, and he was able even to acquire a bow and some arrows to hunt with once he continued along his journey, and a pack to store provisions in when he wandered onward.
Of Coronals and civil wars, these people knew nothing at all. The names “Prestimion” and “Korsibar” and even “Confalume” and “Prankipin” had no significance for them. They lived out here as though on a planet of their own.
He asked them where he was, and they said, in thick hissing accents that he could barely comprehend, “This is the town of Valmambra, where the desert of the same name begins.”
It was like the turning of a key in a door, hearing that name, Valmambra.
Once again Prestimion’s mind went back, far back into what seemed like another life, to that quiet hour spent in his mother’s reading-gallery in Muldemar House. His mother there, and the stoop-shouldered white-haired magus Galbifond. The bowl of slate-colored fluid in which Galbifond had shown him—how?—that all-too-accurate vision of the battle by the shores of the Iyann, the slaughter of his army by Korsibar’s.
But that vision had had a second part, Prestimion remembered now. The battlefield image had faded; the bowl had shown him some grim and bleak landscape, bleaker even than the one he had recently passed. A scattering of isolated jagged hills. Reddish soil, wedge-shaped boulders. The twisted sparse-leaved form of a single szambra-tree writhing before him against the cloudless sky. A tree of the Valmambra Desert and nowhere else, was the szambra-tree. And look! That tiny figure of a man, plodding wearily through the wasteland, every step an effort for him: that short square-shouldered man, golden hair cut short, ragged jerkin, carrying a pack, a bow, a few arrows: himself. Galbifond had let him see it all, there in Muldemar House. Himself, a lonely weary refugee, setting out on foot across the Valmambra toward the wizard-city of Triggoin. Triggoin, where Svor, in a dream, had once been told that Prestimion might learn how to gain the crown that he had lost.
Galbifond had shown all this to him long ago in the depths of that bowl—the battle, the defeat, the trek northward through the desert—and now those very things were coming to pass.
So he must follow his destiny, willy-nilly.
“I have business in the city of Triggoin,” he said to the Ghayrogs of this village that lay at the edge of the desert he knew now he must cross. “Can you tell me how to find the road that leads there?”
The Valmambra was in every way identical to the place Galbifond had shown him in the vision of the bowl—the hills, the boulders, the few twisted trees growing in the reddish soil. But the bowl had been able only to show him the desert: it could not make him feel it. And Prestimion felt it now. It had seemed to him that he had been marching through a desert almost all the time since beginning his northward journey, but he saw now that what he had taken for a desert was a gentle park, a paradise, even, compared with the Valmambra. For the terrain that lay behind him had merely been dry broken country, empty because hardly anybody cared to live there. The Valmambra was true desert indeed, and it was empty because it was virtually uninhabitable.
Triggoin, the Ghayrogs told him, lay in a straight track to the north, on the far side of the desert. He need only guide himself by the stars at night, keep Phaseil to his right and Phasilin to his left and head constantly for the white gleam of Trinatha in the northern sky. After a time he would come to a little village called Jaggereen, another Ghayrog town, which was the only settlement within the Valmambra proper. They would tell him at Jaggereen how to proceed onward to Triggoin.
All that sounded uncomplicated enough. But the Ghayrogs had not prepared him, any more than Galbifond had, for the austerities of the Valmambra. Had not prepared him for the merciless dryness of the land, where you could go three days at a time without finding a source of water, and what you found then would be brackish. For the air, as dry as the sand beneath his feet, so that breathing it parched the nostrils and made the tongue raw and tender. For the heat of day, which seemed as fierce to Prestimion as he supposed the fabled heat of Suvrael must be. For the chill of night, when the clear air released to the sky all the warmth that had poured in by day, and left him huddled and shivering in whatever shelter he managed to find. For the scarcity of anything to eat, nothing at all for two or three days at a time, then only miserable little dry berries and the stems of some low crooked plant with spiny leaves and—occasionally, very occasionally—the stringy meat of the small gray hopping creature with great curving ears the size of its own head that was the only kind of animal life that seemed to live here. Their hearing was so sensitive that it was impossible for Prestimion to stalk them. But now and again he saw one motionless on a hillside across some barren ravine, and by releasing his arrow swiftly in the direction which he thought the animal would run once it heard the sound of the singing shaft heading its way, he was able to bring it down.
Triggoin was supposed to be on the far side of the desert, but the desert appeared to have no end. Prestimion grew weaker and weaker as the demands the Valmambra placed on his already overtaxed body far exceeded the quantity of food and water he was able to find. He was assailed by fever and dizziness, so that the landscape rocked and lurched before him like the breast of a wild sea; his vision grew blurred, so there was no way for him to use his bow; his feet and legs swelled, making every step an aching torment. The clangor coming from the sun’s inexorable light began again, and would not cease. He imagined the sound of thunder in a place that knew no rainstonns. Great oscillating rings of green light surrounded the sun, filling half the sky, or so it seemed to him. Sun-blisters sprang up along his back and shoulders, and after he lay dozing face downward on the sand for a time when he felt too dizzy to go forward, he arose reddened and swollen from neck to ankles, feeling half cooked, or more than half.
A day or two later he ate something hard and blue, a nut of some kind, that stung his mouth and made his eyelids puff to three times their thickness. He was set upon by a cloud of small golden flies, like a mist of bright metal, that bit him in a hundred places and raised blisters. He came to a tangle of impassable brambles many miles wide that barred his path, so that he had to go a long distance to the east before he found a way to continue on his northward route.
He dreamed of Muldemar House, his bed, his stone bathtub, his wine, his soft clean clothes. He dreamed of his friends. One night in his dreams Thismet came to him and danced and opened her bodice to show him small round breasts tipped with hard dark nipples.
He woke retching, one morning, and spent what seemed like an hour vomiting thin white fluid. He woke sobbing once, which astonished him. The leather of his boots began to split. His toes stuck out; he stubbed one and it bled for two days.
He tried not to think of where he was or what was happening to him. He did not want to consider the p
rospect that he would die out here, forgotten and unburied.
For a whole day he thought he was Coronal, and wondered why he was not at the Castle. Then he remembered the truth.
Three lean-shanked animals squatted beside him one night as he waited for sleep at the edge of a dry gully, and made cackling sounds that seemed almost like laughter. They had sharp teeth; he wondered if they would fall upon him and eat him. But they did not. They laughed at him some more, and walked in circles around him, and one by one emitted little piles of bright green turds. Then they moved along. They had no use for him.
He came to a river of sand running through the desert. In the midday sun it blazed like a long line of white fire from the quartz crystals that were in it. He knelt and scooped it up in his hands as though it were water, and let it run through his fingers, and once again wept.
He stumbled over a gnarled shrub and twisted his leg. His knee swelled like a balloon. For two days he could put no weight on it, nor could he walk. He crawled. In a broad open place under the merciless sun, he was attacked by a huge carrion-bird, a thing somewhat like a milufta, with terrible bloodshot eyes and a long bare red neck that had loose skin hanging from it in ruffled folds, and a beak like the edge of a scythe. It came flapping down out of the sky, shrieking as though it had eaten nothing in a month, and tried to wrap him in its great ragged-edged wings. “Not dead yet!” Prestimion cried, and rolled over and kicked at it with his good leg. “Not dead, not dead, not dead!”
Evidently it didn’t care. The bird seemed crazed. It must have gone without food so long that it was willing to kill to eat, though it was plainly a carrion-bird. It clawed at him with curved yellow talons and drew blood from him in half a dozen places. It snapped at his throat, at his eyes. It tore at him and ripped a strip of flesh from his arm, and came back for more. “Not dead yet!” Prestimion kept saying as he struggled to beat the bird away from him. “Not dead!” It was the first time he had spoken aloud in days.