5
Prestimion had dreams himself, that night.
Not nightmares, not him, for he was certain that the scheming poison-taster in Zimroel would not dare to approach the mind of Prestimion Pontifex. These were dreams of his own mind’s devising. But they were wearisome dreams all the same, for in them he went up and up the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep over and over again, forever ascending, never reaching the summit, an endless frustrating daylong journey past terrace after terrace that invariably culminated in his finding himself, at the end, at the very place from which he had set out. By morning Prestimion felt as though he had been climbing the wall of this island all his life. But he concealed his night of uneasy sleep from Varaile. She was preoccupied with Tuanelys: had gone to the little girl’s bedroom more than once during the night, although it had turned out, each time, that Varaile had been imagining Tuanelys’s cries, and the child had been sleeping soundly.
And now it was time for them to begin the upward journey in earnest. May the Divine grant us an easier trip, Prestimion prayed, than the ones I have been making all night.
He held the Lady Tuanelys on his lap aboard the floater-sled that would take them up the vertical wall that was the face of First Cliff. Varaile sat to one side of him, the Lady Taliesme to the other, and the boys in back. When the sled began its giddy climb, Tuanelys, frightened, wriggled about so that her face was buried in her father’s chest; but Prestimion heard a whistle of appreciation from Prince Akbalik as they shot silently and swiftly upward against gravity’s pull. He smiled at that: Akbalik was usually so restrained and serious. But perhaps the boy was beginning to change as he entered adolescence.
At the landing pad at the summit, Prestimion pointed out Numinor port far below, and the jutting arms of the breakwater where the ferry had delivered them to land. Tuanelys did not want to look. The two younger boys were wonderstruck, though, at the height of the ascent they had made. “That’s nothing,” Taradath said scornfully. “We’ve only begun to go up.”
Prestimion found that the children were a welcome distraction during the long journey. It worried him that Taliesme might have held back some of the most disquieting details of the Lady Therissa’s health, and he did not want to think too deeply about what waited for him above. So he derived great pleasure from watching Taradath, who had seen all this before, don the role of tour guide to his brothers and sister, loftily telling them, whether they wanted to know or not, that this was the Terrace of Assessment, where all pilgrims to the Isle were brought first, and this was the Terrace of Inception, and this the Terrace of Mirrors, and so on and so on throughout the day. It was amusing, too, to observe how little the other three cared to be instructed by their know-it-all oldest brother.
“We always stop for the night here at the Terrace of Mirrors,” said Taradath grandly, as if this were a trip he made every six months or so. “First thing in the morning we go up to Second Cliff. It makes you dizzy, you do it so fast. But the view from up there is fantastic. Just you wait.”
Out of the corner of his eye Prestimion caught sight of Prince Simbilon making a face at Taradath behind Taradath’s back, and smiled.
Taradath would be seventeen soon, Prestimion thought. He made a mental note to talk with Varaile about sending him back to the Castle next year, enrolled as a knight-initiate. There was no reason why the grown son of a Pontifex had to remain with his family at the Labyrinth; and it would probably do Taradath some good to have the other young men of the Castle take him down a peg or two. Prestimion had done his best to teach Taradath that once he had entered adult life he would enjoy no special privileges or deferences simply because he was the Pontifex’s son, but perhaps that was a lesson better learned at the hands of one’s own peers.
Floaters were waiting to transport them from the Second Cliff landing stage to the final sled station at the base of Third Cliff. Quickly they traversed the Second Cliff terraces, where the pilgrims completed their training so that they could move on as acolytes to the highest level of the Isle and aid the Lady in her task. Up there on Third Cliff the Lady’s vast staff of acolytes nightly donned the silver circlets that permitted one mind to touch another across any distance, and sent their spirits forth to heal through benign dreams those whose souls were in pain: to guide, to counsel, to console. On previous visits Prestimion, wonderstruck, had watched the Lady’s legions at their work. But there would be no time for such diversions now.
The travelers reached the last of the floater-sled depots by mid-morning. Now came the final upward leap, to the flat summit of the Isle, thousands of feet above their starting point down at sea level.
The younger boys were excited by the astonishing clarity of the air of Third Cliff and the brilliance of the sunlight, which made everything take on a strange unworldly glow. As soon as the sled had landed they came rushing out and began to chase each other around the sled depot, while Taradath called out to them, “Hey, careful, you two! The air is really thin, up this high!” They paid no attention. The summit of Castle Mount was ever so much higher than this, after all. But the air of Castle Mount was artificial; what they were breathing here was the real thing, depleted of oxygen by the altitude, and before long Simbilon and Akbalik were feeling the effect of it, slowing down, panting hard now, staggering dizzily about.
Prestimion, who was standing beside Taradath, leaned close and whispered, “Don’t say it.”
Taradath did not seem to understand at all. “Don’t say what, father?”
“‘I told you so.’ Just don’t say it.” Prestimion put a little crackle into his voice. “All right? They know now that the air is different up here. No need for you to rub it in.”
Taradath blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” he said, and his cheeks reddened as he began to grasp Prestimion’s meaning. “Of course I won’t, father.”
“Good.”
Prestimion turned away, covering his mouth with his hand to hide his grin. Another small step in the boy’s education, he thought. But there was still a long way to go.
The Terrace of Shadows, where the Lady Therissa had made her home since giving up the powers that had been hers, lay within the wall that separated the sheltered sanctuary that was Inner Temple from the rest of Third Cliff. Varaile and the children remained behind at the Third Cliff guesthouse. “Your mother’s house is on the far side of Inner Temple,” Taliesme told Prestimion. She led him through the immaculate garden that surrounded the lovely eight-sided marble building that was now her home, across a close-cut grassy lawn, and into a forested zone beyond that Prestimion had never entered before.
No buildings were visible here: only a curving row of smallish trees of a sort he did not recognize, rising directly in front of him. They had thick, smooth, reddish-brown trunks that bulged oddly in the middle, and bushy crowns of shining blue-green leaves that were lobed so that they looked almost like upturned hands. The trees had been planted so closely, one fat swelling trunk nuzzling up against the next, that they constituted what amounted to a wall. Only in a single place had a narrow space been left, marked by white marble flagstones, by means of which one could enter the very private sector that lay behind the grove.
“Come, majesty,” Taliesme said, and beckoned Prestimion to follow her through.
It was dark and mysterious within. Prestimion found himself in another garden, less regular in form and not as carefully manicured as the one surrounding Inner Temple. It was planted mainly with what looked like palm trees—they had slender, ribbed trunks that rose to a phenomenal height without branching—that exploded far overhead into tremendous clusters of fan-shaped leaves so huge that it seemed they would prevent any sunlight from breaking through the shield that they formed. Yet these gigantic leaves were attached to wiry, tremulous stems that moved about freely in the slightest breeze, so that openings constantly were made in the leafy roof overhead, and bright shimmering shafts of light did penetrate in quickly darting bursts, creating a shifting pattern of shadows beneath.
/> “There is your mother’s home,” Taliesme said, pointing to a low, sprawling villa directly ahead. It was a handsome flat-roofed structure that had been fashioned of the same smooth white stone as had been used in the making of Inner Temple. Secondary buildings, similar in design, flanked it: servants’ homes, Prestimion supposed. Other houses were dimly visible farther in. Those were the homes of senior hierarchs, Taliesme told him. “The Lady Therissa is expecting you. The hierarch Zenianthe, who is her companion, will take you to her.”
Zenianthe, a slim, dignified white-haired woman who seemed to be of about his mother’s age, was waiting for him on a portico lined with potted ferns. She made the Labyrinth symbol to Prestimion and gracefully signalled for him to enter.
The house was smaller within than it appeared from outside, and modestly furnished: the home of someone who has put aside the outer glories of life. The hierarch took Prestimion down a starkly simple corridor, past several little rooms that appeared at a quick glance to be virtually empty, and into a kind of conservatory at the heart of the house, glass-roofed, with a small round pool at its center and pots of greenery arranged along its margin. Prestimion’s mother stood quietly to one side of the pool.
His eyes met hers. The jolt he got at his first sight of her was a far greater shock than he was expecting.
He had done as much as he could to prepare himself for this meeting. The Lady Therissa was five years older now than she had been at their last meeting; she had suffered a crushing loss in the death of her youngest son; and she had been assailed besides by whatever sort of diabolical torments Mandralisca had been sending against her by night. Prestimion knew that the effects of all that would surely be a doleful thing to behold.
He thought, though, that he had succeeded in fortifying himself against the worst of surprises; but now that he was in her presence at last, struggling with the impact of what he was seeing, he realized that no degree of preparation, perhaps, could have been sufficient.
The curious thing was that her great beauty appeared to have survived despite everything. She had always seemed much younger than her years: a slender, regal woman of superb grace and elegance, famous for her pale smooth skin, her dark gleaming hair, her calm unshakable spirit.
Those things, Prestimion knew, were the outward manifestations of the perfection of her soul. Other women might maintain eternal youthfulness with the aid of sorcerers’ incantations and potions, but never the Lady Therissa. She looked the way she looked, over the years, because she was who she was. Neither her early widowhood nor the civil war that had nearly denied her eldest son Prestimion the crown that was rightfully his, nor the death of her second son Taradath in that same war, nor the great responsibilities that had devolved upon her when she had become Lady of the Isle, nor the later convulsion that had come over the world during the time of the plague of madness, had been able in any way to leave any sort of external mark on her.
Now, wondrous to behold, her hair was nearly as dark as ever—and naturally so, Prestimion was certain. Her face, though the lines of age had begun to enter it years ago, was still unwithered: the face of the most beautiful of women, rendered even more lovely, if that was possible, by the work of time. And as he moved around the side of the pool and went forward to greet her, her posture as she awaited him was as erect as ever, her entire bearing as queenly. In all ways the Lady Therissa seemed to be a woman twenty or thirty years younger than she actually was.
Then, looking close into her eyes, he saw where the real change had occurred.
Her eyes. That was the only place: nowhere else but her eyes. Another person, not ever having looked into those eyes before, might not have noticed anything amiss at all. But to Prestimion the transformation of his mother’s eyes was a thing of such stunning, overwhelming magnitude that he was scarcely able to believe what he saw.
In that still-beautiful face her eyes had taken on a blazing, frightful strangeness that contradicted the very beauty in which they were set. They were the eyes of a woman who had lived a hundred years, or a thousand. Deeply sunken now, rimmed by an intricate webwork of fine lines, those transformed eyes stared out at him in a cold, rigid, unblinking way, unnaturally bright, weirdly intense, the eyes of someone who had seen the walls of the world peel back to reveal some realm of unimaginable horrors that lay behind them.
Gone now was that incredible look of serenity, the marvelous radiance that was the outer display of the inner perfection that had been, for him, her most significant characteristic. Prestimion saw the most terrible anguish in his mother’s eyes now. He saw enormous pain in them: pain that was unbearable, but which was being borne nonetheless. It took all the force of will he could muster to keep himself from flinching away from the dreadful gleaming stare of those appalling eyes.
He took her hands in his. There was a tremor in her fingers that had never been there before. Her hands were cold to the touch. He realized fully now how old she was, how worn.
This weakness of hers stunned him. He had always looked to her to be his ultimate reservoir of strength. It had been that way in the time of the war against Korsibar; it had been that way when he had crushed the rebellion of Dantirya Sambail. Now he understood that that strength was exhausted.
I will have vengeance for this, Prestimion told himself.
“Mother—” His voice was hoarse, muffled, indistinct.
“Do I frighten you, Prestimion?”
Determined to give her no sign of the consternation he felt, he forced an unnaturally hearty tone, and a sort of grin. “Of course you don’t, mother.” Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly. “How could you ever frighten me?”
She was not deceived. “I could see it in your face as soon as you came near enough to get a good look at me. A quick little movement at the side of your mouth, it was: it told me everything.”
“Perhaps I was a bit surprised,” he conceded. “But frightened? No. No. You look a little older, I suppose. Well, so do I. So does everyone. It happens. It’s not an important thing.”
She smiled, and the icy harshness of her gaze softened just a little. “Oh, Prestimion, Prestimion, Prestimion, is this any time of your life or mine for you to begin lying to your mother? Don’t you think there are mirrors in this house? I frighten myself, sometimes, when I look into them.”
“Mother—oh, mother—” He gave up all pretense, and drew her close against him, folded her in his arms, held her in a gentle embrace, sending to her whatever he could of comfort.
She had become very thin, Prestimion realized. Almost brittle, as though she were all bones: he was afraid of holding her too tightly for fear that he would injure her in some way. But she pressed herself gladly against him. He heard something that almost might have been a sob, a sound that he had not heard from her before in all the years of his life; but perhaps it had only been an intake of breath, he thought.
When he released her and stepped back he was pleased to see that the fixed hard stare had relaxed a little further, and something of the old warm glow had come back into her eyes.
She nodded to him to follow her, and led him into a simple antechamber nearby, where a flask of wine and two bowls were waiting on a small stone table with an inlaid border of bright mother-of-pearl. Prestimion noticed that her hand quivered just a little as she poured the wine for them.
They took their first sips in silence. He looked straight at her and made no attempt now to avert his eyes, painful as that was for him.
“Was it losing Teotas that did this to you, mother?”
The tone of her reply was a steady, unwavering one. “I’ve lost a son before, Prestimion. There’s nothing worse for a mother than to outlive her child; but I know how to handle grief.” She shook her head. “No, Prestimion. No. It wasn’t Teotas alone that aged me like this.”
“I know something about the dreams you’ve been having. Taliesme told me.”
“You know nothing about those dreams, Prestimion. Nothing.” Her face had darkened, and her voice se
emed an octave deeper now. “Until you’ve directly experienced one yourself, you can’t possibly know. And I pray that the Divine will spare you from anything of the kind.—You’ve not had one, have you?”
“I don’t think so. I dream of Thismet, sometimes. Or that I’m wandering around lost in some strange part of the Castle. A couple of nights ago I dreamed that I was traveling up and up and up to Third Cliff in a floater-sled, without ever getting there. But everybody has dreams of that sort, mother. Just ordinary irritating dreams that you’d rather not be having, but you know you’ll forget them five minutes after you awake.”
“My dreams are of a different kind. They cut deep; and they linger. Let me tell you about my dreams, Prestimion. And then perhaps you’ll understand.”
She took a slow sip of her wine and stared down into the bowl, swirling it slowly. Prestimion waited, saying nothing. He knew a little of what Teotas’s deadly dreams must have been like, and Varaile’s, and even, to some degree, Tuanelys’s. But he wanted to hear what his mother had to say of her own dreams, first, before he spoke to her of those other ones.
She was silent for a time. Then at last the Lady Therissa looked across at him again. Her eyes had taken on once more the cold, hard, ferocious glare they had had when he had first stared into them. But that he knew better, he might have thought those eyes were the eyes of a madwoman.
“Here is how it happens, Prestimion. I lie down, I close my eyes, I let myself slide off into sleep as I have done every night for more years than I care to think about.” She spoke quietly, calmly, impersonally, as though she were telling a mere story, some fable about a person who had lived five thousand years before. “And—it happens once a week, perhaps, or twice, sometimes three—not long after sleep comes, I feel an odd warmth behind my forehead, a warmth that grows and grows and grows until I think my brain must be on fire. There is a throbbing in my head, here, here—” She touched her temples and the roof of her skull. “A sensation, also, as of a bright, hot beam of light cutting into my forehead and going deep within. Going into my soul, Prestimion.”