A few days later the Pontifical party set out on the return journey to the Labyrinth: by ship along the north shore of the Stoienzar Peninsula to Treymone of the famous tree-houses, and overland from there through the Velalisier Valley and the Desert of the Labyrinth to the imperial capital. Dekkeret stood with Prestimion at the royal quay on the Stoien waterfront for a brief farewell as Varaile and the Pontifex’s children boarded their vessel. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys remained tactfully to one side. At Dekkeret’s request, they would be accompanying him into Zimroel on the grand processional.
Dekkeret spoke briefly of his regrets over the harsh words that had passed between them not long before; but Prestimion brushed that aside, saying that he regretted his own anger at that breakfast meeting at least as much, and that the whole episode was best put out of mind. Out of it, he pointed out, had come a general agreement between them on some of the greatest matters of state that any Coronal and Pontifex had ever had to contemplate.
Prestimion did not need to add that the specific set of tactics to use in handling the Zimroel problem was something he was leaving in Dekkeret’s hands. They both knew that: this was a Coronal’s task, not a Pontifex’s.
As for the advent of the fourth Power of the Realm and Dinitak’s designation as King of Dreams, they left any recapitulation of that unsaid also. Dekkeret knew that Prestimion was still uncomfortable with the concept, but that he would not stand in the way of implementing it—eventually. Prestimion had had his conference with Dinitak, although neither man chose to discuss with Dekkeret what had taken place. Evidently all had gone well, Dekkeret concluded. The campaign against Mandralisca came first, though.
At the end they embraced, and it was a warm one, though it was, as always, an awkward business on account of the difference in their heights. Prestimion bade Dekkeret farewell, and congratulated him once more on his marriage, and wished him well in his grand processional, and told him they would meet again at the Castle once the work at hand had been consummated. Then he turned and walked in all imperial dignity aboard the vessel that would carry him to Treymone, without looking back.
Dekkeret himself, his bride, his companions Dinitak Barjazid and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, and the rest of the royal entourage were on their way five days later. They too began their journey by ship, sailing northward from Stoien across the Gulf to the quiet little port of Kimoise on the western coast. Fast floaters were waiting there that took them up the coast to Alaisor via Klai and Kikil and Steenorp, a retracement in reverse of the route they had followed down to Stoien for Dekkeret’s rendezvous with the Pontifex. But there would be a long wait in Alaisor while the fleet was assembled and the troops mobilized.
For it was a mobilization. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He knew he had to go across to Zimroel prepared to fight a war. But the great test of his reign would lie in whether he could succeed in sidestepping that war. Would that be possible? He profoundly hoped so. He was the Coronal Lord of Zimroel as well as that of Alhanroel, but he did not want to win the loyalty of the citizens of the western continent by the sword.
This was Dekkeret’s fourth visit to Alaisor, the major metropolitan center of the western coast. But he had never had time on the other three journeys to see the great city properly.
On his first visit, traveling to Zimroel with Akbalik of Samivole years ago when he was still just a young knight-initiate, he had stopped there only long enough to catch the ship that would take them across the Inner Sea. He had passed through Alaisor again a couple of years later, this time an even shorter visit, for that was the frenzied time when he was racing across the world to the Isle of Sleep to bring word to Lord Prestimion that Venghenar Barjazid had escaped from prison at the Castle and intended to turn his thought-control helmets over to the rebel Dantirya Sambail. And on this most recent visit, just a few months before, Dekkeret had been there only a couple of days before receiving word that Prestimion had arrived in Stoien and requested his immediate presence. He had barely had an opportunity to place a wreath on the tomb of Lord Stiamot before it was necessary to move onward.
Now, though, there was more than ample time to experience the marvels of Alaisor. Dekkeret would gladly have been on his way to Zimroel without delay. But there were ships to call in from other ports, new ones to construct, soldiers to levy from the surrounding provinces. Like it or not, his stay in Alaisor was going to be an extended one this time.
It was a superbly located city, an ideal seaport. The River Iyann, running westward through upper Alhanroel, reached the sea here. By carving a deep track through the lofty palisade of black granite cliffs that ran parallel to the shore, the river had created a link between the districts of the interior and the great crescent bay at the base of the mountains. That bay at the mouth of the Iyann had become the harbor of Alaisor. The city itself had sprung up primarily along the coastal strip, with tendrils of urban settlement reaching behind it into the hills to form the spectacularly situated suburb of Alaisor Heights.
Dekkeret and Fulkari were housed in the four-level penthouse suite atop the thirty-story Alaisor Mercantile Exchange where visiting royalty usually stayed. From their windows they could see the dark spokes of the grand boulevards that ran toward the waterfront from all corners of the city, converging just below them in the circle marked by six colossal black stone obelisks that was the site of Lord Stiamot’s tomb. Stiamot had been en route to Zimroel in his old age, the story went, to ask the pardon of the Danipiur of the Metamorphs for the war he had waged against her people, when he fell mortally ill in Alaisor. He had asked to be buried facing the sea. Or so the story went.
“I wonder if he’s really buried there,” Dekkeret said, as they looked down on the ancient tomb. Some people of Alaisor were moving among the obelisks, strewing handfuls of bright flowers. The tomb was freshly bedecked with blossoms every day. “For that matter, did he ever exist at all?”
“So you doubt him too, the way you doubted Dvorn, when we were at his tomb.”
“It’s the same thing. I agreed that someone whose name was Dvorn probably was Pontifex at some time or other long ago. But was he the one who founded the Pontificate? Who knows? It was thirteen thousand years ago, and at that distance in time do we have any good way of distinguishing history from myth? Likewise with Lord Stiamot: so ancient that we can’t be sure of a thing.”
“How can you say that? He lived only seven thousand years ago. Seven’s very different from thirteen. Compared with Dvorn, he’s practically our contemporary!”
“Is he? Seven thousand years—thirteen thousand—these are incredible numbers, Fulkari.”
“So there never was a Lord Stiamot at all?”
Dekkeret smiled. “Oh, there was a Lord Stiamot, all right. And either he or somebody else of the same name probably was the one who conquered the Metamorphs and sent them off to live in Piurifayne, I suppose. But is he the man who’s buried under those black obelisks? Or did they just bury someone there, five or six thousand years ago, someone important at that time, and gradually the idea took hold that the person in that tomb is Lord Stiamot?”
“You’re terrible, Dekkeret!”
“Simply realistic. Do you believe that the real Stiamot was anything like the man the poets tell us about? That superhuman hero, striding from one end of the world to the other the way you or I would walk across the street? My guess is that the Lord Stiamot of The Book of Changes is ninety-five percent fable.”
“And will the same thing happen to you, do you think? Will the Lord Dekkeret of the poems that will be written five thousand years from now be ninety-five percent fable too?”
“Of course. Lord Dekkeret and Lady Fulkari both. Somewhere right in The Book of Changes Aithin Furvain himself tells us that Stiamot once heard someone singing a ballad about one of his victories over the Metamorphs, and wept because everything they were saying about him in that song was wrong. And even that is probably a fable too. Varaile once told me that they were singing songs in the marketpl
ace about Prestimion’s struggle with Dantirya Sambail, and the Prestimion they sang about was nothing like the Prestimion she knew. It’ll be the same with us someday, Fulkari. Trust me on that.”
Fulkari’s eyes were glistening. “Imagine it: poems about us, Dekkeret, five thousand years from now! The heroic saga of your great campaign against Mandralisca and the Five Lords! I’d love to read one of those—wouldn’t you?”
“I’d love to know what the poet tells us about how things turned out for Lord Dekkeret, anyway,” said Dekkeret, staring down somberly at the ancient tomb in the plaza below. “Does the saga finish with a happy ending for the gallant Coronal, I wonder? Or is it a tragedy?” He shrugged. “Well, at least we won’t have to wait five thousand years to find out.”
There was no escaping a second ceremony at the tomb this time, and a visit to the temple of the Lady atop Alaisor Heights, the second holiest shrine to the Lady in the world, and a formal dinner at the celebrated Hall of Topaz in the palace of the Lord Mayor of Alaisor, Manganan Esheriz. And as the weeks went by there were other official events as well, a numbing succession of them, as Alaisor took full advantage of the unusual fact of a Coronal’s extended presence in the city.
But Dekkeret spent as much of his time as possible planning his tour of Zimroel: the landing at Piliplok, the journey up the Zimr, the entry into Ni-moya. He learned the names of local officials, he studied maps, he sought to identify potential trouble spots along the way. The trick would be to arrive at the head of a huge army while still managing to carry off the pretense that this was only a peaceful grand processional undertaken for the purpose of introducing the new Coronal to his western subjects. Of course, if he should find a rebel army waiting for him when he landed at Piliplok, or if Mandralisca had gone so far as to blockade the sea against him, he would have no choice but to meet force with force. But that remained to be seen.
The summer ticked along. The time soon would come, Dekkeret knew, when the season changed and the winds turned contrary, blowing so vigorously out of the west that departure would have to be postponed for many months. He wondered if he had misjudged the timing, had spent so much time assembling his fleet that the invasion must be delayed until spring, and his enemies given that much more time to dig themselves in.
But at last everything seemed propitious for departure, and the winds still were favorable.
His flagship was called the Lord Stiamot. Of course: the local hero, the Coronal whose name was a synonym for triumph. Dekkeret suspected the ship had formerly borne some less resounding name and had hastily been renamed on his behalf, but he saw no harm in that. “Let that name be an omen of our coming success,” Gialaurys said with gruff exuberance, pointing to the golden lettering on the hull as they went aboard. “The conqueror! The greatest of warriors!”
“Indeed,” said Dekkeret.
Gialaurys was exuberant also—indeed, he was the only one—when Piliplok harbor finally came into view, many weeks later, after a slow and windy crossing of the Inner Sea made notable by the presence of a great band of sea-dragons that stayed close at hand much of the way. The huge aquatic beasts frisked and frolicked about Dekkeret’s fleet with alarming playfulness day after day, lashing the choppy blue-green sea with their immense fluked tails and sometimes rising from the water, tail first, to display nearly their entire awesome bodies. The sight of them was exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But at last the dragons vanished to starboard, disappearing into the next phase of whatever mysterious journeys the sea-dragons were wont to make in the course of their endless circlings of the world.
Then the sea changed color, darkening to a muddy gray, for the voyagers had reached the point off shore where the first traces of the silt and debris carried into the ocean by the Zimr could be detected. The huge river, in its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel, transported untold tons of such stuff eastward. At its gigantic mouth, sixty miles across and wider, all that tremendous load was swept into the sea, staining it for hundreds of miles out from shore. The sight of that stain meant that Piliplok city could not be far away.
And then, finally, the shore of Zimroel came into view. The chalky mile-high headland just north of Piliplok that marked the place where the great mouth of the Zimr met the sea stood out brightly against the horizon.
Gialaurys was the first to spy the actual city. “Piliplok ho!” he bellowed. “Piliplok! Piliplok!”
Piliplok, yes. Was a hostile fleet waiting there for him, Dekkeret wondered?
It did not appear that way. The only vessels in view were mercantile ones, moving about their business as though nothing at all were amiss. Evidently Mandralisca—unless he had some surprise up his sleeve—did not intend to deny the Coronal of Majipoor the right to land on Zimroel’s soil. To defend the continent’s entire perimeter against invasion was, after all, an enormous task, possibly beyond the rebels’ resources. Mandralisca must be drawing a line somewhere closer to Ni-moya, Dekkeret decided.
Gialaurys could barely contain his delight as his birthplace came into view. Joyfully he clapped his hands. “Ah, there’s a city for you, Dekkeret! Take a good look, my lord! Is that a city, or isn’t it, eh, my lord?”
Well, he had every reason to smile at the sight of his native city. But Dekkeret, who had been to Piliplok before on his trip with Akbalik, knew what to expect of it, and he greeted the place with none of the old Grand Admiral’s glee. Piliplok was not his idea of urban beauty. It was a city that only its natives could love.
And Fulkari gasped in outright shock at her first glimpse of it as they entered the harbor. “I knew it wasn’t supposed to be beautiful, but even so, Dekkeret—even so—could it have been some lunatic who laid this place out? Some crazed mathematician in love with his own insane plan?”
That had been Dekkeret’s reaction too, that other time, and the city had grown no lovelier in the twenty-odd years of his absence. From the central point of its splendid harbor its eleven great highways fanned out in rigidly straight spokes, crossed with unerring precision by curving bands of streets. Each band delimited a district of different function—the marine warehouses, the commercial quarter, the zone of light industry, the residential areas, and so forth—and within each district every building was of an architectural style unique to that district, every structure looking precisely like its neighbor. Each district’s prevailing style had only one thing in common with the styles of its neighbors, which was that they all were characterized by a singular heaviness and brutality of design that oppressed the eye and burdened the heart.
“In Suvrael, where hardly any trees or shrubs of the northern continents can survive our heat and powerful sunlight,” said Dinitak, “we plant what we can, palms, tough succulents, even the poor scrawny things of the desert, for the sake of giving our cities some beauty. But here in this benevolent coastal climate, where anything at all will grow, the good folk of Piliplok seem to choose to grow nothing at all!” Shaking his head, he pointed toward shore. “Do you see a stem anywhere, Dekkeret, a branch, a leaf, a flower? Nothing. Nothing!”
“It is all like that,” said Dekkeret. “Pavement, pavement, pavement. Buildings, buildings, buildings. Concrete, concrete, concrete. I remember seeing a shrub or two, last time. No doubt they’ve had those removed by now.”
“Well, we aren’t coming here as settlers, are we?” said Septach Melayn lightly. “So let us pretend that we adore the place, if they should ask us, and then let us get ourselves far from it as soon as we can.”
“I second the motion,” Fulkari said.
“Look,” said Dekkeret. “Here comes our reception committee.”
Half a dozen vessels had put out from the harbor. Dekkeret, still uneasy, was relieved to see that they did not have the look of military ships—he recognized them as the strange-looking fishing vessels of Piliplok that were known as dragon-ships, lavishly ornamented with bizarre fanged figureheads and sinister spiky tails, with garish painted rows of white teeth and scarlet-and-yellow eyes
along their sides, and intricate many-pronged masts carrying their black-and-crimson sails—and that they flew ensigns of welcome that showed the green-and-gold colors symbolic of the power and authority of the Coronal.
It could, of course, all be some deceptive maneuver of Mandralisca’s, Dekkeret supposed. But he doubted that. And he felt further reassurance when a huge voice came booming across the waters to him through a speaking-tube, crying out the traditional salute: “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” It was the unmistakable deep rumble of a Skandar’s voice. There was a greater concentration of the giant four-armed beings in Piliplok than anywhere else in the world. The Lord Mayor of Piliplok himself, Kelmag Volvol by name, was a Skandar, Dekkeret knew.
And that was unquestionably Kelmag Volvol now, an immense shaggy figure nearly nine feet high in the red robes of mayoralty, standing in the bow of the lead dragon-ship making clusters of starburst signs, four at a time, and then signalling that he wished to come aboard the Lord Stiamot for a parley. If this were a trap, Dekkeret thought, would the mayor of the city have been willing to bait it with his own person?
The two flagships lined up broadside. Kelmag Volvol clambered into a wickerwork transport basket. A thick rope that culminated in a massive curved blubber-hook, normally used in the butchering of sea-dragons, was lowered from the rigging and the hook was fastened to the basket. The rope then was hoisted by pulleys so that the basket containing Lord Mayor Kelmag Volvol was lifted aloft and swung outward over the rail of the ship. Slowly and steadily it traveled through the gap separating the vessels, Kelmag Volvol standing solemnly upright all the while, and neatly deposited him beside the capstan head on the deck of the Lord Stiamot.