“Did any of your ancestors happen to come from Normork?” he asked her, then.
She looked puzzled. “No, excellence. We are Sipermit people, going back thousands of years.”
“Strange. You remind me of someone I once knew there. I am of Normork myself, you know. And there was a certain person—the daughter of my father’s sister, in truth—”
No, no, there was no way to link her to Sithelle. The resemblance was a mere coincidence, uncanny though it was. But Dekkeret lost little time drawing her into his life. Fulkari was a dozen or so years younger than he, and had had no experience in the ways of the court, but she was quick-witted and lively and eager to learn, and fiercely passionate, and not the least bit shy. It was strange, though, holding her in his arms, and seeing that face, so much like Sithelle’s, so close to his own. He and Sithelle had never been lovers, had never even dreamed of such a thing; if anything, he had regarded her more as a sister than a cousin.
Now here he was embracing a woman who seemed almost to be Sithelle reincarnated. At times it felt oddly incestuous. And he wondered: Was he replicating with Fulkari the relationship that he had never had with Sithelle? Was it truly Fulkari that he loved, or was he in love, instead, with the fantasy of his lost Sithelle? That was a considerable problem for him. And it was not the only one she posed for him.
He drew her to him and held her close against him, cheeks touching first, then lips. It made no difference to him that the guardsmen who occupied the post just inside the Dizimaule Arch were watching. Let them watch, he thought.
After a time they stepped back from one another. Her eyes were shining; her breasts rose and fell rapidly beneath the soft, pliant leather.
“Come,” she said, nodding toward the mounts. “Let’s go down into the meadow.”
She vaulted easily into her beast’s natural saddle and took off without waiting for him.
Dekkeret’s mount was a fine slim-legged one of a deep purple color tinged with blue, of the sort specially bred for swiftness and strength. He settled himself easily in the broad saddle that was an integral part of the creature’s back, gripped the pommel that sprouted in the same way just in front of him, and sent the mount speeding forward after her with a quick urgent pressure of his thighs. Cool sweet air streamed past him, lifting and ruffling his unbound hair.
He wondered how many more opportunities he would have to slip away from the Castle like this, a private citizen bound on a journey of private amusement, unattended, unhindered. As Coronal he would rarely if ever be able to go anywhere by himself. His visit to Normork had shown him what was in store for him. There would always be bodyguards about, except when he managed somehow to give them the slip.
But now—the wind in his hair, the bright golden-green sun high overhead, the splendid mount thundering along beneath him, Fulkari racing on ahead—
Below the southern wing of the Castle lay a belt of great open meadows, through the midst of which ran the Grand Calintane Highway, the one traveled by all wayfarers bound for the Castle. There was no day of the year when these meadows were not in bloom, stunning bursts of blue flanked by bright yellow blossoms, masses of white and red, oceans of gold, crimson, orange, violet. The riding track Fulkari had chosen passed to the left of the highway, into the gently sloping countryside that lay above the nearby pleasure-city of High Morpin, ten miles away.
Dekkeret caught up with her after a time and they rode along side by side. They were far enough down the Mount now that the long shadow of the Castle could be seen reaching out before them, tapering to a slender point. Soon the meadowland gave way to a forest of hakkatinga trees, small and straight-trunked, with reddish-brown bark and dense crowns that grew tightly interlaced with their neighbors to form a thick canopy.
Here the mounts could not go as swiftly, and slowed to a canter without being told.
“I missed you so very much,” Fulkari said, as they rode along side by side. “It felt as if you were gone for a month.”
“For me also.”
“Did you have a lot of important meetings to attend as soon as you came back? You must have been terribly busy all day yesterday.”
He hesitated. “I had meetings, yes. I don’t know how important they were. But I had to be there.”
“About the Pontifex? He’s dying, isn’t he? That’s what everybody’s been saying.”
“No one knows,” Dekkeret said. “Until firm news comes from the High Spokesman, we’re all in the dark.”
They had reached a part of the forest now where he and she had been more than once before. The treetops were so closely woven together here that even in mid-morning a kind of twilight dusk prevailed. A small stream ran here, which a colony of dam-building granths had blocked with gnawed logs to form a pretty little pond. Along its margin was a thick, soft azure carpet of sturdy, resilient bubblemoss. It was a lovely little secret bower, sheltered, secluded.
Fulkari dismounted and tethered her reins to a low-hanging branch. He did the same. They faced each other uncertainly. Dekkeret knew that the wisest thing to do was to reach for her now, quickly fold her in his arms, draw her down onto that mossy carpet, before anything could be said that would break the magic of the moment. But he could see that she wanted to speak. She held herself apart from him, moistened her lips, paced restlessly about. Words were struggling to burst free within her. She had not brought him here merely for lovemaking.
“What is it, Fulkari?” he asked, finally.
She said, in a tone dark with tension, “The Pontifex is going to die soon, isn’t he, Dekkeret?”
“It’s as I just told you: I don’t know. No one at the Castle does.”
“But when he does—will you be made Coronal?”
“I don’t know that either,” he said, hating himself for the cowardly evasion.
She was unrelenting. “There can’t be any doubt of it, can there? You’ve already been named Coronal-designate. The Coronal doesn’t ever change his mind and pick someone else, once he does that.—Please, Dekkeret, I want you to be honest with me.”
“I expect to be made Coronal when Confalume dies, yes. If Lord Prestimion asks me, that is, and the Council ratifies.”
“If you’re asked, you’ll accept?”
“Yes.”
“And what will happen to us, then?” Her voice came to him as though from a great distance.
He had no choice now but to go forward with this. “A Coronal should have a consort. I was discussing that very thing with the Lady Varaile last evening.”
“You make it sound so impersonal, Dekkeret. ‘A Coronal should have a consort.’” She seemed frightened at speaking to him so bluntly, he who soon would be king, and yet there was an angry edge to her tone all the same. “Does it happen that there’s anyone in particular whom you might select to be your consort, perhaps?”
“You know there is, Fulkari. But—”
“But?”
He said, “You’ve made it clear in a thousand ways that you don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”
“Have I?”
“Haven’t you? A minute ago you asked me if I’d accept the throne if it was offered to me. As though it was a fairly common thing for people to refuse to become Coronal, Fulkari. It was last month, I think, that you wanted to know, out of the blue, whether any Coronal-designate had ever turned it down. And before that, that time when you and I were in Amblemorn—”
“All right. That’s enough. You don’t need to dredge up any more things of that sort.” She appeared close to tears, and yet her voice was still steady. “I asked you to be honest with me. Now I’ll be just as honest with you.” Fulkari paused a moment. Then she said, regarding him evenly, “Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”
He nodded. “I know that. But if you don’t, why have you let yourself become the lover of the Coronal-designate? For the sake of excitement? Amusement? You knew, when we met, what Prestimion had in mind for me.”
“You speak as though
these things happen by design. Did I come to the Castle expecting to fall in love with Coronal-designate Dekkeret? Did I pursue you in any way after I arrived? You saw me. You sought me out. We talked. We went riding together. We fell in love. I could just as easily ask you, why did the Coronal-designate choose as his lover a woman who doesn’t happen to think it’s such a wonderful thing to be the wife of the Coronal?”
“I didn’t realize that I had done any such thing. That was something I discovered only gradually, as we got to know each other. It’s troubled me tremendously ever since I figured it out.”
Her face was flushed with anger. “Because our little emotional entanglement stands in the way of your great ambition?”
“You can’t call becoming Coronal my ambition, Fulkari. I never asked for it. I never even imagined that it could be possible. It came to me by default, when an earlier logical heir unexpectedly died.” How could he make her understand? Why was it such a struggle? “No Coronal ever sets out to win the throne. If it doesn’t descend on him out of inevitable logic, he doesn’t merit it. For years, now, the logic has pointed to me.”
“And must you go along with that logic?”
He looked at her helplessly. “It would be shameful to refuse.”
“Shameful! Shameful! That’s all you men are concerned with—pride, shame, how things will look! You say you love me. You know how frightened I am of your becoming Coronal. And yet—because your pride won’t let you say no to Prestimion—”
Now she was weeping. Awkwardly he took her in his arms. She did not resist, but her body was stiff, withdrawn.
Quietly he said, “Explain to me why it is that you don’t want to be my consort, Fulkari.”
“A Coronal spends all his time reading official documents, signing decrees, going to meetings. Or else he’s traveling to some far-off place to attend banquets and make speeches. He has very little time for his wife. How often do you see Prestimion and Varaile together? The Coronal’s wife has banquets and functions to go to and speeches to make, too. It seems like a hideous dreary exhausting job. It would devour me. I’m only twenty-four years old, Dekkeret. I don’t feel anywhere close to ready to taking on a life like that.”
“Hush,” he said, as though soothing a child. That was how she seemed to him now, anyway: if not a child, then still adolescent, far from any real maturity. He saw now why Varaile was so troubled over the present state of his relationship with Fulkari. Varaile hoped that Fulkari would be Majipoor’s next royal consort, and was afraid that Dekkeret was on the verge of discarding her. But Varaile had no real understanding of the way things really stood.
Did he, though? Fulkari’s beauty, her eerie resemblance to Sithelle, had mesmerized him also into thinking that she had in her the material of a royal consort. But evidently she did not. A royal mistress, yes. But not a queen. She had been telling him that, indirectly at first and now quite explicitly, for a long time now. “Hush,” he said again, as her sobbing deepened. “It’s all right, Fulkari. The Pontifex may not be dying at all. He may go on living for years—years—”
He was saying things now that he did not believe in the slightest. But it seemed more important to comfort her, just then, than to try to address the realities of the situation.
For the realities of the situation were that he would become Coronal and that he could not marry Fulkari, who plainly did not want to be a Coronal’s wife; and so he had no choice but to break with her forever, here and now. But that was something he did not think he could bring himself to do. Certainly not today; perhaps not ever. It was an impossible situation.
He held her close. He stroked her tenderly. Gradually the sobbing ceased. The stiffness of her stance began to ease.
Then, by an almost imperceptible transition, they found themselves with a single accord passing from anguish and confusion and unreconcilable conflict to the rhythms of desire and need. This was their special place, where they had often come to escape from the bustling intrusiveness of Castle life; and here beside the sweet dark pond the granths had built under the close-woven hakkatingas, a sudden familiar urgency once more overcame them and thrust all other considerations aside.
Fulkari, as ever, took the lead. She kissed him lightly and moved a short way back from him. Touched her hand to the metal clasps of her garment at breast, hip, and thigh. The soft leather gave way as though sliced by an invisible blade. She stepped quickly free of it and stood radiantly bare before him, pale, slender, smiling, irresistible, holding out her hands to him. Her eyes, those gray-violet Sithelle eyes of hers, were shining. They beckoned to him. For Dekkeret there was magic in that bright gleam. Sorcery.
At that moment the issue of who would or would not be the consort of the next Coronal of Majipoor seemed as far away to him, and as unimportant, as the sandy desert wastes of Suvrael. He could not think of such things now. He was helpless against the magic of her beauty. That smile, the sight of her slim naked form, the glow of those marvelous eyes, brought back to blazing life all that had caught him and gripped him again and again these three years past. He reached for her and pulled her lightly toward him, and they sank down together, intertwined, on the carpet of bubblemoss beside the pond.
15
“Today, I think, is our day for the singlestick baton,” said Septach Melayn a little doubtfully. “Or is it the basket-hilt saber we do today?”
“Rapier, excellence,” said young Polliex, the graceful dark-haired boy from Estotilaup, Earl Thanesar’s second son. “Tomorrow’s the day for singlesticks, sir.”
“Rapier. Ah. Yes, of course, rapier. No wonder you’re all wearing your masks.” Septach Melayn put the error behind him with a shrug and a smile.
There was a time when he had regarded little errors of memory as sins against the Divine, and did penance for them with extra hours of sword drills. But he had lately made a treaty with himself, and with the Divine as well, concerning such errors. So long as his eye remained keen and his hand was still unfaltering, he would forgive himself for these small slips of his mind. As a man ages he must inevitably resign himself to the sacrifice of one faculty or another; and Septach Melayn was willing to give up some fraction of the excellence of his memory if in return he might keep the unparalleled flawlessness of his coordination for another year or three, or five, or ten.
He selected a rapier from the case of weapons against the wall and turned to face the class. They had already formed themselves in a semicircle, with Polliex at his left and the new one, the girl Keltryn, at the opposite end of the row. Septach Melayn always began the day’s work with one end of the row or the other, and Polliex always managed to position himself in a favorable place to be among the first chosen. The girl had very quickly picked up the trick from him.
There were eleven in the class: ten young men and Keltryn. They met with Septach Melayn every morning for an hour in the gymnasium in the Castle’s eastern wing that had been his private drilling room since the earliest days of Prestimion’s reign. It was a bright, high-ceilinged room whose walls were pierced by eight lofty octagonal windows that admitted copious floods of light until shortly after midday. Some said that the place had been a stable in the days of Lord Guadeloom, but Lord Guadeloom’s days had been very long ago indeed, and the room had been used as a gymnasium since time out of mind.
“The rapier,” said Septach Melayn, “is an exceedingly versatile weapon, light enough to permit great artistry of handling, yet capable of inflicting significant injury when it is used as an instrument of defense.” He scanned the semicircle quickly, decided not to choose Polliex for today’s first demonstration, and automatically looked over toward the other side, where Keltryn was waiting. “You, milady. Step forward.” He raised his sword and beckoned to her with it.
“Your mask, sir!” came a voice from the middle of the group. Toraman Kanna, it was, the prince’s son of Syrinx, he of the dark smooth skin and seductive almond eyes. He was ever one to point out things like that.
“My mask, yes,” S
eptach Melayn said, grinning sourly. He unhooked one from the wall. Septach Melayn always insisted that his pupils wear protective face-masks whenever the sharper weapons were used, for fear that some novice’s wild random poke would take out a princely eye and create an inconvenient hullaballoo and outcry among the injured boy’s kinsmen.
One day, though, the suggestion had been made to him in class that he too should wear a mask, by way of setting a proper example. It seemed wildly absurd to him that he of all people should be asked to take such a precaution—he whose guard had never been broken by another swordsman, not even once, except only that time at the Stymphinor engagement in the Korsibar war, when he had taken on four men at the same time on the battlefield and some coward had sliced at him from the side, beyond his field of peripheral vision. But for consistency’s sake he agreed. Still, it was often necessary for his students to remind him to don the ungainly thing at the outset of each class.
“If you please, milady,” he said, and Keltryn moved into the center of the group.
Septach Melayn still had not fully adapted to the concept of a female swordsman. He was, of course, much more comfortable in the company of young men than in that of women or girls: that was simply his nature. There had always been a circle of them in attendance on him. But the fact that his pupils had always been male was not so much a matter of his preference as theirs; Septach Melayn had never so much as heard of a woman’s wanting to wield weapons, until this one.
The odd thing was that this Keltryn seemed to have a natural gift for the sport. She was seventeen or so, nimble and swift, with a lean frame that might almost have been a boy’s, and the exceptionally long arms and legs that were a mark of advantage in swordsmanship. She had her older sister’s coloring and her older sister’s sparkling beauty, but Fulkari’s every motion was infused with a soft seductiveness that was apparent even to Septach Melayn, though he did not respond to it, whereas this one’s movements had an irrepressible coltish angularity that seemed delightfully unfeminine to him. And one could never imagine Fulkari picking up a sword. The weapon seemed not in any way out of place in Keltryn’s hand.