The King of Dreams

  “Oh—mother—how dreadful, mother—”

  “What I’ve told you so far is the easy part. After the heat, the pain, comes the dream itself.—I am in court. I am on trial before a shouting mob. I stand accused of the most loathsome betrayals of trust, of the filthiest of lies, of treachery against those I was chosen to serve. It is an impeachment, Prestimion. I am being removed from my post as Lady of the Isle for having been negligent in my tasks.”

  She paused, then, and took some more wine, and sipped it unhurriedly. The effort of telling him these things was obviously a drain on her energies.

  Prestimion was all but certain, now, that what was afflicting her had to be sendings from Mandralisca. But some part of him wanted not to believe that: wanted to cling to the wan hope that the poison-taster had not succeeded in making contact with his mother’s mind.

  Grasping at shadows, he said, “Forgive me for this, mother, but I see little difference here between this dream and any of mine in which I chase Thismet down a corridor of a thousand slamming doors. Our sleeping minds generate ridiculous absurdities to torture us. But when I awaken from the Thismet dream I know that she’s long dead, and the dream evaporates like the empty thing it was; and when you awaken from your dream of being placed on trial you should know that you were never—”

  “No.” The single syllable cut through his words like a knife. “Your dream, I agree, is nothing more than the floating upward of the crumbling debris of the past, like something drifting on the tide. You awaken and it’s gone, leaving only a troubling residue that remains just a little while. Mine is something quite other, Prestimion. It carries the force of reality. I awaken convinced of my own guilt and shame, utterly and unshakably convinced. And that feeling lingers on and on. It penetrates me like the venom of a serpent. I lie there sweating, shivering, knowing that I have failed the people of Majipoor, that in my term as Lady of the Isle I did nothing that was good, but only incalculable harm, to millions of people.”

  “You are convinced of this.”

  “Beyond all possibility of argument. It becomes more than a dream. It becomes a fact of my existence, as real to me as your father’s name and face. A basic part of me that nothing could eradicate.”

  Prestimion’s last doubts of the nature and source of his mother’s dark dreams fell away from him. How could he resist the truth any longer? He had heard things much like this before, from Dekkeret, speaking of Teotas’s dreams. Guilt—shame—an overriding sense of unworthiness, of failure, of having betrayed those whom one had sworn to serve—

  She was watching him. Those eyes—those eyes—!

  “You aren’t saying anything, Prestimion. Do you understand in any way what I’m telling you?”

  He nodded wearily. “Yes. Yes, I do. I understand very well. These are sendings that you’re receiving, mother. A malevolent force is reaching into your mind from without and implanting things, more or less the way the Lady of the Isle implants dreams in those she serves. But the Lady brings only benevolent dreams that have no more than the force of suggestion. These dreams of yours carry far greater power. They have the force of reality. They are something that you have no choice but to believe is true.”

  The Lady Therissa seemed a little surprised. “So you know these things already, then!”

  Again he nodded. “And I know who’s sending them, too.”

  “As do I.” She touched her fingertips to her forehead. “I still have the circlet I wore when I was Lady of the Isle. I used it to reach out toward the source of my dreams and identify it. It is Mandralisca, back at his evil work again.”

  “I know.”

  “He has killed Teotas, I think, by sending him dreams that were beyond his power to endure.”

  “I know that too,” Prestimion said. “Dekkeret has worked it out, bit by bit, with the help of his friend Dinitak Barjazid. There is another Barjazid loose in the land, the brother of the one I killed at Stoienzar. He has allied himself with the poison-taster, who himself is in league with the kinsmen of Dantirya Sambail, and these hellish thought-control helmets are being made again. They have been used against Teotas, and against you, and also, I think, Varaile, and even, it may be, against my little daughter Tuanelys.”

  “But not, so far, against you.”

  “No. Nor do I expect that. I think he may be afraid to challenge me outright. To attack the Pontifex is to attack Majipoor itself: the people will not follow him there. No, mother, what he wants is to intimidate me by striking at those who are closest to me, I think, hoping that he can force me into making a deal of some kind with him and the people he serves. To grant them political control in Zimroel, perhaps. To restore to them the authority that I took away from the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”

  “He will kill you, if he can,” the Lady Therissa said.

  Prestimion rejected that idea with a sweeping gesture of his hand. “That’s something that I don’t fear at all. I doubt that he would attempt it; I know that if he tried, he would not succeed.” He left his seat and crouched at her side, resting one hand lightly over her forearm and staring up into her ravaged eyes. Tautly he said, “The one who will die, mother, is Mandralisca. You can be certain of that. I would slay him for what he did to Teotas, alone. But now that I know what he has done to you—”

  “It’s your plan to make war against him, then,” she said, stating it, not asking.

  “Yes.”

  “And raise an army and invade Zimroel and destroy this man with your own hand? I hear it in your voice. Is that what you mean to do, Prestimion?”

  “Not I myself,” Prestimion said quickly, for he could see where she was heading with this. The patterns of conflict crossing her features were obvious, her fierce loathing for Mandralisca and all he represented playing against her fears for her eldest son’s life. “Oh, what I would give to be the one who cuts him down! I won’t attempt to deceive you about that. But my days on the battlefield, I’m afraid, have been over for a very long time, mother. Dekkeret is my sword now.”

  6

  It was the sixteenth day of Dekkeret’s journey across the broad central plain of Alhanroel to the great city of the northwestern coast, Alaisor. He had arrived now at the city of Shabikant on the River Haggito, a muddy southward-flowing stream that came down from the Iyann. The one and only thing Dekkeret knew about Shabikant was that it was the place where the famous Trees of the Sun and the Moon grew.

  “We should visit them while we have the chance,” he told Fulkari. “We may never pass this way again.”

  As Prestimion had suggested, the Coronal and his party had taken the land route to Alaisor. It would have been far quicker to go by riverboat down Castle Mount via the Uivendak and its tributaries to the swift River Iyann, which would carry them onward to the shores of the Inner Sea. But there was no need for haste, since Prestimion would be making the long trip to the Isle before returning to Alhanroel, and he and Dekkeret were both agreed that there were advantages to be gained in having the new Coronal present himself formally at various major cities while on his way west, rather than hurrying by them by riverboat, with no more than a wave and a smile for the millions of people whom he would pass.

  Therefore he had gone by way of the Great Western Highway to the grim mercantile center of Sisivondal in the midst of the dusty Camaganda drylands, a journey that was exceedingly ugly but spared them the troublesome crossing of the rugged Trikkala Mountains, and from Sisivondal across the great curving bosom of Majipoor through Skeil and Kessilroge and Gannamunda and Hunzimar into the grassy Vale of Gloyn, where enormous herds of bizarre animals grazed placidly in huge savannas of copper-colored gattaga-grass, and onward beyond Gloyn, the halfway point between Castle Mount and Alaisor, in a gently north-northwesterly direction, stopping here and there to confer the honor of the new Coronal’s presence on this provincial duke and that rural mayor. With not a word said to anyone along the way, of course, of the growing disturbance in Zimroel. That was no one’s business except the Coronal?
??s, thus far. Certainly these good people of west-central Alhanroel had no need to know about the minor unrest on the other continent.

  Dinitak, by donning his helmet daily, was keeping Dekkeret apprised of what was going on over there. The five nephews of Dantirya Sambail had returned from their wanderings in the desert and set up a headquarters in the city of Ni-moya, something that they were not exactly forbidden to do, but provocative all the same. And it appeared that they had taken control of Ni-moya and the region immediately surrounding it, which, if the reports that Dinitak’s mind-trollings had brought back were correct, was definitely a violation of Prestimion’s twenty-year-old decree stripping Dantirya Sambail and his heirs forever of any and all political power in Zimroel.

  Dekkeret did not feel that any of this required an immediate governmental response. He expected that he soon would have confirmation of Dinitak’s reports arriving by way of more orthodox channels, along with greater detail of what actually was taking place, and he would wait until those reports had come. Then he and Prestimion together, when they met as planned a month or two from now at the coastal city of Stoien, could work out a fitting strategy for dealing with these troublesome Ni-moyans.

  The royal party reached Shabikant a short while past noon, when the city, spreading before them for many miles to the north and south on the broad sandy plain that bordered the eastern bank of the Haggito, lay basking in the warmth of the bright mid-country sunlight.

  Shabikant was a city of four or five million people, evidently something of a metropolis as the cities of this region went—a pretty place of graceful buildings of pink or blue stucco topped with ornate roofs of green tile. The mayor and a party of municipal officials came riding out to greet Dekkeret and his companions, and much bowing and starburst-making and speechifying took place before they finally were escorted into town.

  The mayor—his title was hereditary and largely ceremonial, one of Dekkeret’s aides whispered to him—was a rotund, red-faced, green-eyed little man named Kriskinnin Durch, who appeared generally overwhelmed at finding himself playing host to the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. Apparently Lord Dekkeret was the first Coronal to have visited Shabikant in several centuries. Kriskinnin Durch seemed unable to get over the fact that this great event was taking place during his own administration.

  But he nevertheless wasted no opportunity in letting Dekkeret know that he himself was descended on his mother’s side from one of the younger brothers of the Pontifex Ammirato—a not very significant monarch of four hundred years before, as Dekkeret recalled. “Then you are of far more distinguished lineage than I am,” Dekkeret told him amiably, amused rather than annoyed by the man’s bare-faced pretentiousness. “For I am descended from no one in particular at all.”

  Kriskinnin Durch seemed not to have the slightest idea of how to respond to such a bland statement of humble origins coming from the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. He chose, therefore, to pretend that Dekkeret had not uttered it.

  “You will, of course, pay a call on the Trees of the Sun and the Moon while you are among us?” the mayor went on.

  “That was my very intention,” said Dekkeret.

  Fulkari, speaking so that only he could hear, said, “They all seem to be descended from the brothers of Pontifexes on their mother’s side, these backwoods mayors. And from beggars and thieves and counterfeiters on their father’s; but it all averages out, doesn’t it?”

  “Hush,” said Dekkeret, with a quick wink and a light squeeze of her hand.

  By way of a royal hostelry he and Fulkari were provided with a pleasant pink-walled lodge right at the river’s edge, which probably was usually employed to house the mayors of nearby cities and other such regional functionaries when they came calling on Kriskinnin Durch. Dinitak and the rest of Dekkeret’s staff were taken off to lesser lodgings nearby.

  “I most sincerely hope you will find everything here to your liking, my lord,” said the mayor obsequiously, and, backing away, bowed himself out of their presence.

  His chambers, Dekkeret saw, were large but lacking in grace of design. They were furnished in the overstuffed style that had been popular nearly a century ago in the early years of Lord Prankipin’s reign—everything covered with heavy brocaded upholstery and resting on squat, ungainly legs. A scattering of drab crude paintings that surely had to be the work of local artists decorated the walls, most of them hanging slightly askew. The whole place was almost exactly as he would have expected. Quaint, Dekkeret thought: very quaint.

  The mayor had tactfully given Lord Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari separate suites, since no reports of any royal marriage had reached the city of Shabikant and people tended to be quite fastidious about such matters out in these agricultural provinces. But the two suites were, at least, adjacent, and there was a connecting door, bolted closed, that was not at all difficult to open. Dekkeret began to think the mayor might not be quite as stupid as he had seemed on first encounter.

  “What are these Trees of the Sun and the Moon?” Fulkari asked him, when they were finished installing themselves in their rooms and their various chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting had gone off to their own quarters. Dekkeret had thrown the bolt and come into her suite, where he found Fulkari lolling in a great tub of blue stone, lazily scrubbing her back with a huge brush whose long handle was of such a strange zigzag design that it might just as easily have been some kind of implement of witchcraft.

  “As I understand it,” he said, “they’re a pair of fantastically ancient trees that are supposed to have the power of oracular speech. Not that anyone’s heard them say anything for the past three thousand years or so, I hasten to add. But a Coronal named Kolkalli came here somewhere back then while making a grand processional and went to see the trees, and precisely at sunset the male tree spoke, and said—”

  “These trees have sexes?”

  “The Tree of the Sun is male and the Tree of the Moon is female. I don’t know how they can tell. Anyway, the Coronal came to the trees at sunset and demanded that they predict his future, and at the moment the sun sank below the horizon the male tree said thirteen words in a language that the Coronal couldn’t understand. Kolkalli became very excited and asked the priests of the trees if they would translate it for him, but they claimed that nobody in Shabikant was able to speak the language of the trees any more. In fact they did understand it, but they were afraid to say anything, because what the tree had uttered was a prophecy of the Coronal’s imminent death. Which happened three days later, when he was stung on the finger by a poisonous gijimong and died in about five minutes, which is essentially the only thing that is remembered about the Coronal Lord Kolkalli.”

  “You believe this?” Fulkari asked.

  “That the Coronal was stung on the finger by a gijimong and died? It’s in the history books. One of the shortest reigns in Majipoor’s history.”

  “That the tree actually spoke, and it was a prophecy of his death.”

  “Verkausi tells the story in one of his poems. I remember studying it in school. I confess I don’t quite see how a tree would be capable of speech, but who are we to quarrel about plausibility with the peerless Verkausi? I take a neutral position on the subject, myself.”

  “Well, if the trees do say anything tonight, Dekkeret, you mustn’t let the locals slither out of translating the message.” Fulkari brandished her fists in a pose of mock ferocity. “‘Translate or else,’ you’ll tell them! ‘Translate or die! Your Coronal commands it!’”

  “And if they tell me that the tree has just said that I’ve got three days to live? What do I do then?”

  “I’d keep away from gijimongs, just for a starter,” Fulkari replied. She extended one long, slender arm toward him. “Help me out of the tub, will you? It’s got such a slippery bottom.”

  He took her hand and she leaped lithely over the rim of the tub and into the huge towel that he held open for her. Gently, lovingly, he rubbed her dry as she nestled against him. Then he tossed the towel aside.

/>   For the fiftieth time that day Dekkeret was struck by the luminous beauty of her, the radiance of her hair, the sparkle of her eyes, the strength and vigor of her features, the elegant compromise that her body had made between athletic trimness and feminine voluptuousness. And she was such a splendid companion, besides: clever, alert, perceptive, lively.

  It amazed him constantly how close they had been to a parting of the ways. He still could hear, all too often, echoes of words that had once been spoken: Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal, she had said to him in that forest grove on Castle Mount. And he to Prestimion, in the Court of Thrones of the Labyrinth: It’s very clear that she’s the wrong woman for me. It was hard now to believe that they had ever said such things. But they had. They had. No matter, Dekkeret thought: time had passed and things were different now. They would marry as soon as this annoying business of Mandralisca was behind them.

  His eyes encountered hers, and he saw the mischief glinting in them.

  “But there’s no time now,” he said plaintively. “We have to get dressed. His excellence the mayor is awaiting us for lunch, and the tour of the city, and at sunset we go to see the celebrated talking trees.”

  “You see? You see? It’s business all the time, for the Coronal and his consort!”

  “Not all the time,” Dekkeret said, speaking very softly, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder. She was warm and fragrant from the bath. He ran his hands lightly down her long lean back, across her smooth rump, along her flanks. She trembled against him. But she was holding herself in check just as he was. “When today’s speechifying is over,” he said, “there’ll be just the two of us here, and we’ll have all night to ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”