It was most elegantly designed, made of the sturdy black bamboo of Sippulgar, which has canes nearly as hard as iron. The canes were six inches in diameter, cut to twenty-foot lengths, gilded, and bound by silken cords. Not a single nail had been used anywhere. The roof also was made of bound lengths of Sippulgar cane, varnished annually with the red sap of the grifafa tree, which preserved it against all decay. Interior columns, these likewise of bamboo canes tied three together, formed its supports. Sea-dragon emblems in red surmounted each column.
The Summer Palace stood on a little hillock that lifted it above the rest of the island, affording the Coronal a vista of the distant shores of the Great Lake. So artfully had the building been constructed that it would be only the work of a single day, supposedly, to dismantle it and shift it to face in a different direction, in case the Coronal should tire of the view from his bedroom and request another. Those who had been allowed to tour the palace in modern times—visiting dukes and counts, members of the families of former Coronals, important captains of industry who had come to Ertsud Grand leading trade missions—were inevitably told of this special feature of its design. In Lord Kassarn’s day, so the story went, the palace was taken down and repositioned every year just before the Coronal came to Ertsud Grand for his summer retreat. Sometimes, at the Coronal’s request, it had been done more frequently than that. But no one actually could remember the last such occasion.
Though visits by Coronals to the Summer Palace had become uncommon events in modern times, and no Coronal at all had gone there during the past thirty-five years, the municipality of Ertsud Grand kept both structures, the marble pavilion and the one of bamboo, constantly in readiness for his lordship’s imminent arrival. Maintenance of the buildings was entrusted to a curator with the title of Major-Domo of the Palaces, and he had a staff of twenty full-time employees who swept the hallways, dusted the paintings and statues, trimmed the shrubbery, fed the beasts of the park, repaired what needed to be repaired, and each week put fresh linens on the beds in all the innumerable rooms.
The position of major-domo was hereditary. For the past five hundred years it had been a perquisite of the family of Eruvni Semivinvor, who had been a kinsman of a famous ancient mayor of Ertsud Grand. The current major-domo—Gopak Semivinvor, the fourth of that name—had held the post for almost half a century, and so it had fallen to him to greet Lord Confalume on the occasion of the second of his two visits to the Summer Palace.
That visit, which had lasted four days, was the high point of Gopak Semivinvor’s life. Again and again he relived it in the years that followed: hailing the Coronal and his wife the Lady Roxivail as they disembarked from the royal barge, conducting them through the marble outer palace and the game park to the bamboo palace, opening their wine for them and personally serving them their first meal, then leaving them together in splendid regal privacy. Public rumor had it that the Coronal’s marriage was a troubled one; Gopak Semivinvor was convinced that Lord Confalume and Lady Roxivail had come to Ertsud Grand in an attempt at reconciliation, and he never ceased to believe that such a reconciliation had indeed taken place during those four days, despite all the subsequent evidence to the contrary.
During the remaining years of Lord Confalume’s reign and the whole of Lord Prestimion’s, Gopak Semivinvor had lived eternally in expectation of the next royal visit. He arose each dawn—the major-domo lived in a cottage in a quiet corner of the game park—and conducted a full inspection of the outer palace and then the inner one, compiling a long list of work for his staff to do before the visiting Coronal’s party arrived. It was a source of great disappointment to him that that visit never came. But still the inspections went on; still the bamboo roofs received their yearly coat of varnish; still the stone-floored halls of the outer palace were swept and the marble building-blocks repointed. Gopak Semivinvor was eighty years old, now. He did not intend to die until he had once more played host to a Coronal in the Summer Palace of Ertsud Grand.
When news of the impending ascension of Prince Dekkeret to the royal throne reached the ears of Gopak Semivinvor, his first response was to consult his magus for a prognostication of the likelihood that the new Coronal would visit the Summer Palace.
Like many people of the era of the Pontifex Prankipin and the Coronal Lord Confalume, Gopak Semivinvor had developed a profound faith in the ability of soothsayers to foretell the future. The particular school of shamans to which he subscribed was based in Triggoin, the capital city of Majipoori sorcery, in northern Alhanroel beyond the desolate Valmambra desert. It was known as the Advocacy of the Four Names; in recent years it had won a wide following in Ertsud Grand and several neighboring cities of the Mount. Gopak Semivinvor patronized a tall, preternaturally pale Four Names sorcerer named Dobranda Thelk, who was very young for a practitioner of his trade, but had a cold intensity in his gaze that carried a sense of absolute conviction.
Would the Coronal, Gopak Semivinvor asked, soon come calling at the Summer Palace?
Dobranda Thelk closed his glittering eyes for a moment. When he reopened them he seemed to be peering deep into Gopak Semivinvor’s soul.
“It is quite clear that he will come,” said the magus. “But only if the palace is in in good order, and all is in full accordance with expectation.”
Gopak Semivinvor knew that it could never be otherwise so long as he was in charge of the palace. And such a wild throb of joy ran through him that he feared that his breast would burst.
“Tell me,” he said, laying a royal on the sorcerer’s tray and then, after a moment’s consideration, putting a five-crown piece beside it, “what particular things must I do to ensure the complete comfort of Lord Dekkeret when he is at the Summer Palace?”
Dobranda Thelk mixed the colored powders that he used in divination. He closed his eyes again and murmured the Names. He spoke the Five Words. He sifted the powders through his hands, and said the Names a second time, and then the Three Words that could never be written down. When he looked up at Gopak Semivinvor those potent eyes of his were as hard as auger-bits.
“There is one thing above all else: you must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. You are able to locate those stars in the sky, are you not?”
“Of course. But how am I to know which position of the palace is the one that provides the proper relationship?”
“That will be revealed to you in dreams,” replied Dobranda Thelk.
“By a sending, do you mean?”
“It could be in that form, yes,” said the magus, and from the coolness of his tone Gopak Semivinvor knew that the consultation was at an end.
Three times in his long life Gopak Semivinvor had experienced sendings of the Lady of the Isle, or so he believed: dreams in which the kindly Lady had come to him and offered him reassurance that his life’s journey followed the correct path. There had been no specific information for him to use in any of those three dreams, only a general feeling of warmth and ease. But that night, as he made ready for bed, he knelt briefly and asked the Lady to grace him with a fourth sending, one that would guide him in his desire to serve the new Coronal in the best possible way.
And indeed, not long after he had given himself over to sleep, Gopak Semivinvor felt the sensation of warmth in his scalp that he regarded as the portent of a sending. He lay perfectly still, suspended in that condition of observant receptivity that everyone learned as a child, in which the sleeper’s mind was simultaneously lost in slumber and vigilantly aware of whatever guidance the dream might bring.
This seemed different from his previous sendings, though. The sensations were not particularly benign. He felt a touch, definitely a touch, from outside, but not a kindly one. The pressure against his scalp was greater than it had been those other times, was even painful, in a way; the air seemed to grow chill around his sleeping body; and there was no trace of that feeling of well-being that one always expected to have from contact with the mind of th
e Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Yet he maintained his receptivity to what was to come, holding his mind open and allowing it to be flooded with an awareness of—
Of what?
Discontinuity. Disparity. Incongruity. Wrongness.
Wrongness, yes. A powerful sense that the hinges of the world were coming undone, that the joints of the cosmos were loosening, that the gate of terror stood open and a black tide of chaos was pouring through.
He awakened then, sitting up, holding himself tightly in his own arms. Gopak Semivinvor was sweating and trembling so distemperately that he wondered if his last moments might be upon him. But gradually he grew calm. There was still a strange pressure in his brain, that feeling as of something pushing from without—a disturbing feeling, a frightening one, even.
Some moments passed, and then clarity of mind began to return, and a certain degree of ease of soul; and with that came the conviction that he understood the meaning of the oracle’s words.
You must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. Plainly the present configuration of the bamboo palace was an improper one, unluckily aligned, out of tune with the movements of the cosmos. Very well. The building was designed to be dismantled and reconstructed along a different axis. That was what must be done. The palace needed to be turned on its foundation.
That the palace had not been dismantled and moved in hundreds of years—maybe as much as a thousand—did not trouble the major-domo for more than an instant. Some small prudent voice within him suggested that the project might be more difficult than he suspected, but against that tiny objection came the insistent clamor of his desire to get on with the work. Desperate haste impelled him: the magus had spoken, the troubling dream had somehow provided reinforcement, and now he must make the palace ready, in accordance with the commandment that had been laid upon him, and lose no time about it. Of that he had no doubt. Doubt did not seem an option in this enterprise.
Nor did it concern him that he did not, at the moment, know which orientation of the building would be more desirable than the present one. It had to be moved, that was clear. The Coronal would not come unless it was. And he had every reason to think that the appropriate positioning would be revealed to him as he set about the task. He was the Major-Domo of the Palaces, and had been for nearly fifty years; it had been given into his hands to care for this wonderful building and keep it ready at all times for the use of the anointed Coronal; one might even say that destiny had chosen him to perform that special task. He was confident that he would perform it correctly.
Gopak Semivinvor rushed out into the night—a mild one and warm, Ertsud Grand’s climate being one of almost unending summer—made his way through the game park to the bamboo palace’s front gate, scattering nocturnal mibberils and thassips as he ran, and sending big-eyed black menagungs fluttering up into the treetops. Panting, dizzy with exertion, he leaned against the gatepost of the building and stared upward until he located the brilliant red star Xavial, which marked the midpoint of the sky, the great axis of the universe. Its mighty counterpoise, bright Thorius, lay not far to the left of it.
Now—how to determine the right position for the building, the one that represented the proper relationship to Thorius and Xavial—?
He turned, and turned, and, unsure, turned again, and yet again. His mind began to reel and swirl. It seemed to Gopak Semivinvor after a time that he was standing still, and the whole vault of the sky was whirling furiously about him. East, west, north, south—which direction was the right one? This way, and the Coronal’s bedroom would face the row of great mansions along the eastern shore of the lake; this, and he would be looking toward the pleasure-houses of the western shore; turn like this, and his rooms would yield the sight of the dense forest of furry-leaved kokapas trees that rimmed the lake’s southern edge. Whereas to the north—
To the north, equidistant between the stars Xavial and Thorius, was the blazing white star Trinatha, the sorcerers’ star, the star that rested in the heavens above the city of wizards, Triggoin.
Into the soul of Gopak Semivinvor came flooding the ineluctable certainty that Trinatha was the key to what the magus Dobranda Thelk had meant by the “proper relationship.” He must swing the building around until the Coronal’s bedroom pointed along the line that ran between Thorius and red Xavial to holy Trinatha, the white star of wizardry, Dobranda Thelk’s own guiding star.
Yes. Yes. It was precisely the midnight hour, the Hour of the Coronal. What could be more auspicious? He caught up a sharp stick and began scratching deep gouges in the soft velvet of the lawn that ringed the bamboo palace, ugly brown lines that indicated the precise configuration to which the building must be shifted. He worked with frantic urgency, trying to finish the task of sketching his plan before the stars, as they journeyed through the night sky, had moved on into some other pattern of relationship.
In the morning Gopak Semivinvor summoned his entire crew, the twenty men and women who had worked under his supervision for so long, some of them nearly as long as he himself had been major-domo. “We will dismantle the building at once, and reposition it by ninety degrees, a little more or a little less, so that it faces in this direction,” he said, holding his hands out in parallel along the lines gouged in the lawn to indicate how he meant the palace to be turned.
They were obviously dismayed. They looked at one another as though to say, “Is he serious?” and “Can the old man have lost his mind?”
“Come,” Gopak Semivinvor said, clapping his hands impatiently. “You see the patterns in the grass. These two long lines: they mark the place where the Coronal’s bedroom window must face when the rebuilding is complete.” To his foreman he said, “Kijel Busiak, you will have a row of stakes driven immediately into the ground along the lines I’ve drawn, so that there’ll be no chance of confusion later on. Gorvin Dihal, you will arrange at once for the weaving of a complete set of new binding-cords for the canes, since I fear the ones that exist will not survive the dismantling. And you, Voyne Bethafar—”
“Sir?” said Kijel Busiak timidly.
Gopak Semivinvor stared toward the foreman in annoyance. “Is there some question?”
“Sir, is it not true that the story that the building was designed to be taken apart and quickly reassembled is nothing but a myth, a legend, something that we tell to visitors but don’t ourselves believe?”
“It is not,” Gopak Semivinvor said. “I have studied the history of the Summer Palace deeply for many decades, and I have no doubt not only that it can be done, but that it has been done, over and over again in the course of the centuries. It simply has not been done recently, that is all.”
“Then you have some manual, sir, which would explain the best way of carrying out the work? For of a certainty no one alive has any memory of how the thing is done.”
“There is no manual. Why would such a thing be necessary? What we have here is a simple structure of bamboo canes joined by silken cords and covered with a roof of the same sort. We unfasten the cords; we part the roof-beams, remove them, and set them aside; we take down the outer walls cane by cane. Then we draw a careful plan of the interior and remove the interior walls also, and restore them in the same relative positions, but facing the new way. After which, we reinsert the canes of the walls in their foundation-slots and reconstruct the roof. It is simplicity itself, Kijel Busiak. I want the work to commence at once. There is no telling when Lord Dekkeret will choose to appear in our midst, and I will not have a half-finished palace sitting here when he does.”
It did seem to him, as he contemplated the task, that the old tales of taking the building down and putting it back together in a single day must be just that: old tales. The job appeared rather more complicated than that. More likely it would take a week, ten days, perhaps. But he foresaw no difficulties. In the heat of the excitement that suffused his spirit at the thought that a royal visit was at last imminent, he could not doubt that it would be
child’s play to dismantle the palace, shift every orientation by ninety degrees, and re-erect it. Any provincial architect should be capable of handling the job.
There were some other mild protests, but Gopak Semivinvor was short with them. In the end his will prevailed, as he knew it must. The work began the next day.
Almost at once, unanticipated problems cropped up. The roof-beams turned out to be slotted together most intricately at the building’s peak, and the jointures by which they were fastened to the supporting columns and the upper tips of the canes that formed the building’s walls were similarly unusual in design. Not only was the style of them antiquated but the technique of fitting the tenons into the mortises was oddly and needlessly baffling, as if they had been designed by a builder determined to win praise for his originality. Gopak Semivinvor heard little about this from his workmen, for they feared the old man’s wrath and suffered under the lash of his impatience. But the work of disassembling the building went on into a second week, and a third. Gopak Semivinvor now was heard to say that it might be best to dismiss the whole batch of them and bring in younger workers who might be more cunning practitioners.
The ends of many of the beams broke as they were pulled apart. The unusual slots cracked and could not be repaired. An entire interior wall crashed down unexpectedly and the canes were shattered. Word went forth to Sippulgar for replacements.
Eventually, though—the whole process took a month and a half—the Summer Palace had been transformed into a heap of dismembered canes, many of them too badly damaged to be re-used. The foundation, laid bare now, proved to be also of cane, badly disfigured by dry rot. A number of the slots into which the canes of the wall had been inserted swelled through an uptake of humid air as soon as the canes they had held were removed, and it did not appear as if the old canes could be inserted in them again.