Halefice’s loyalty and devotion were beyond question. He was Mandralisca’s right hand, as Mandralisca had been the right hand of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. And yet, in all their time together, Halefice had never dared to speak so intimately with Mandralisca as he had just done. In its way that was, Mandralisca thought, somewhat moving.
He said carefully, “If they seem to treat me with contempt, Jacomin, it’s because their manner is ever a coarse one, as is the style of their whole clan. You remember their elegant father Gaviundar, and his beautiful brother Gaviad. Nor was their uncle Dantirya Sambail known for the gentleness of his tongue. Where you see contempt, my friend, I see only something of a lack of tact. I take no offense. It is in their nature. They are crude rough men. I forgive them for it, because we are all players in the same game, do you take my meaning?”
“Sir?” said Halefice blankly.
“Apparently you don’t. Let me put it this way: I serve the needs of the Sambailids, whether they know it or not, and I think they do not, but also they serve mine. It is the same between you and me, as well. Think on it, Jacomin. But keep your findings to yourself. Let us not discuss these things again, shall we?” Mandralisca turned away, toward his own simple cottage. “Here is the parting of our ways,” he said. “I wish you a good day.”
10
The lights remained on and the steward Falco stayed with Prestimion while he calmed himself. Diandolo brought him something cool and soothing to drink. The master of the lodge, virtually beside himself with chagrin that his royal guest had undergone so terrifying a dream under his own roof, produced such an outpouring of solicitousness and fuss that Falco had to order him from the room. Young Prince Taradath, who had accompanied Prestimion to Fa and had a suite of his own across the courtyard, now made a belated appearance, aroused at last from the deep sleep of adolescence by all the furore in the halls. Prestimion sent him away also. His father’s nightmares need not be any concern of his.
This was the third day of Prestimion’s state visit to Fa. Things had been going predictably thus far, the banquets, the speeches, the conferring of royal honors upon deserving citizens, and all the rest. But for the first two nights running he had had the lost-in-unknown-levels-of-the-Castle dream, although, the Divine be thanked, without the additional anguish of having Thismet entering into it. But this time the thing in all its full ghastliness had descended on him.
“You were shouting something like, ‘tizmit, tizmit, tizmit,’ my lord,” Falco said. The name of Thismet would mean nothing to him, of course. There were no more than six people in all the world who knew who she had been. “It was so loud I could hear you from two rooms away. ‘Tizmit! Tizmit!’”
“We are likely to say anything in dreams, Falco. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
“This must have been a very bad one, my lord. You still look pale.—Here, give me that,” he said, reaching behind him to take the flask that Diandolo had just brought into the room. “Can’t you hear how sore the Coronal’s voice is?—Another drink, my lord?”
Prestimion took the flask. It was brandy, this time. He gulped it down like so much water.
Falco said, “Shall I summon a speaker for your dream, lordship?”
“No one speaks the Coronal’s dreams except the Lady of the Isle, Falco. You know that. And the Lady is nowhere within reach.” Prestimion rose, a little unsteady on his feet, and went to the window. All was dark outside. It was still the middle of a moonless night here in lovely Fa, that gay and ever-charming city of tier upon tier of pink hillside villas with lacy stone balconies. He braced himself on the windowsill and leaned outward, seeking the cool sweet night air.
Twenty years, and Thismet still haunted him.
She and her brother both were long dead, dead and forgotten, so thoroughly forgotten that even their own father had no idea that they had ever lived. Prestimion’s team of mages had seen to that, on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge just after the great victory, when by a colossal act of sorcery they had blotted all knowledge of the Korsibar insurrection from the memory of the world.
But Prestimion had not forgotten. And, even after all these years with Varaile, Varaile whom he loved with a fervor that had never ebbed, Thismet persisted in stealing back into his unguarded mind again and again as he slept. He knew he would never rid himself of the hold she had on him. She had been his dedicated enemy; then had come the astounding thunderbolt of their love; and then, when she had been his for scarcely any time at all, that shattering hour on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge in which he had won his crown and lost his bride almost in the same moment.
“I’ll leave you now, my lord,” Falco said. “You’ll want to get back to sleep. It’s still three hours to dawn.”
“Leave me, yes,” said Prestimion.
But he made no attempt to return to his bed. The dream would only be waiting for him there. He took from its bronze case the portfolio of official documents awaiting his signature that went with him everywhere, and set to work. There were always fifty or a hundred things stored up for him to sign, most of them generated by the ever-busy bureaucrats of the Pontificate, some the work of his own governmental departments.
Much of it was trivial stuff, routine proclamations and decrees, trade treaties between one province and another, revisions of the customs code, the sort of workaday business that other Coronals would have sloughed off on aides to read, so that they would merely need to scan a brief appended summary before signing. The papers from the Labyrinth, which had already been approved by the Pontifex or someone acting in his name, did not even require the Coronal’s attention, only his countersignature. In theory the Coronal had the right to reject a Pontifical decree and send it back to the Labyrinth for reconsideration, but no one could remember when any Coronal had last availed himself of the privilege. But Prestimion tried to read as much of this material as he could. In part that was due to an overriding sense of duty; but also he found it oddly comforting, on nights such as these, to immerse himself in such meaningless mind-numbing toil.
Dawn was still an hour or two away when he heard sounds from the courtyard: the gate being opened, the whirring hum of an arriving floater, a deep, commanding voice loudly calling for porters. That was strange, Prestimion thought, someone turning up at the royal lodge at an hour like this, and making so much noise about it at that.
He peered out.
The floater was from the Castle. It bore the royal starburst emblem. A big, heavyset man in a belted ankle-length red tunic had emerged from it. His great chest and shoulders led Prestimion to think at first that this might be Gialaurys; but this man was heftier even than the Grand Admiral, with a jutting gut on him that would make Gialaurys seem almost slender by comparison. And he spoke with the pure accent of Castle Mount, not Gialaurys’s broad, flat, almost comical Piliplok intonation. Prestimion realized after a moment that it must be Navigorn.
Here? Why? What had happened?
“Falco!” Prestimion called. The steward was at the door almost immediately. He looked as though he, too, had not gone back to sleep. “Falco, the Lord Navigorn has just arrived. He’s in the courtyard. See that he’s shown up here right away.”
The three flights of stairs left Navigorn winded and flushed. He swayed alarmingly in the doorway for a moment, a tall ungainly figure confronting the compactly built Prestimion. With difficulty he said, “Prestimion, I’ve—just—come—straight from the—Castle. I set out yesterday afternoon, traveled right on through the night.” Gingerly Navigorn lowered his bulky form into one of the chairs beside the window, a finely wrought thing of golden kamateros-wood that creaked and groaned beneath his weight, but held firm. “You don’t mind if I sit, do you, Prestimion? Sprinting up those stairs—” He grinned. “I’m not exactly in fighting trim these days.”
“Sit. Sit. You take up less space this way.” Navigorn elaborately settled himself into place. Patiently Prestimion said, “Why are you here, Navigorn? Do you come with bad news?”
The big man’s eyes rose to meet his. He seemed to search a moment for the proper way to begin. “The Pontifex may have had a stroke.”
“Ah,” Prestimion said, exhaling the word almost as though he had been punched in the chest. “A stroke. May have had a stroke, you say?”
“There’s no confirmation. I apologize, Prestimion, for awakening you with something like this, but—”
“I was awake, as a matter of fact.” Prestimion indicated the papers strewn about his desk. “Tell me about this stroke. This possible stroke.”
“A message came from the Labyrinth. Numbness in his hand, stiffness in his leg. Mages have been called in.”
“Is he going to die?”
“Who can say? You know how tough the old man is, Prestimion. He’s made of iron.” A pained expression crossed Navigorn’s fleshy face. He turned and twisted so restively in his chair that it creaked a protest. He scowled and screwed up his face. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, this probably is the beginning of the end for him. Just my guess, you understand. Pure intuition. But the man’s ninety years old, he’s been Pontifex for twenty years and he was Coronal for forty-odd before that—even iron wears out, you know, sooner or later. I’m sorry, Prestimion.”
“Sorry?”
“No Coronal ever wants to go to the Labyrinth.”
“But every Coronal eventually does, Navigorn. Do you think this catches me unprepared?” And then, almost as if to contradict his own words, Prestimion went over to the sideboard, where a flask of Muldemar wine was sitting, and poured some into a bowl. “Do you want any?” he asked.
“At this hour of the morning? Yes, actually. Yes, I do.”
Prestimion handed him the bowl and poured another for himself. They drank in silence. A cascade of troublesome thoughts thundered through Prestimion’s brain.
Pacing about the room, he said, “What do you think I ought to do, Navigorn? Return to the Castle right away and await developments? Or set out for the Labyrinth to pay my respects while his majesty is still alive?”
“Phraatakes Rem doesn’t seem to think Confalume’s death is imminent. I’d go back to the Castle, if I were you. Meet with the Council, discuss things with the Lady Varaile. And then take yourself down to the Labyrinth.” Navigorn looked up. Suddenly there was a broad incongruous smile on his face. “This is good wine, Prestimion! From your family’s vineyards?”
“There’s none better, is there? Some more?”
“Please. Yes.”
Prestimion filled the bowls again and they sat thoughtfully sipping the rich purple wine for a time, neither of them speaking.
He found it strangely moving that it was Navigorn, rather than Septach Melayn or Gialaurys or his brother Teotas, who had brought him this unsettling news. He and Navigorn had been friends a long while, he supposed, but their friendship had never been the same sort of intimacy that he had with the others. Indeed, they had even been enemies, once, though Navigorn had no recollection of that. That had been in the time of the Korsibar usurpation, when Navigorn had unhesitatingly given his loyalty to the false Coronal, and had fought valiantly on Korsibar’s behalf in the civil war.
But of course Navigorn had not regarded Korsibar as a false Coronal. However unlawfully Confalume’s ill-advised son had placed himself upon the throne, however much his seizure of power had violated all custom and convention, he had been duly anointed and crowned, and, so far as the people of Majipoor were concerned, he was the proper Coronal. So of course when Prestimion had challenged Korsibar’s legitimacy as king and had gone to war to overthrow him, Navigorn had staunchly served the man he recognized as his king. It was only in the hour of Korsibar’s defeat, when the world was in chaos and Prestimion’s triumph was assured, that Navigorn had urged Korsibar to surrender and abdicate in order to keep the bloodshed from going on any longer.
But stubborn stupid Korsibar had refused to yield, and had died in the battle of Beldak marsh below Thegomar Edge; and Navigorn, kneeling before Prestimion, had admitted his error and begged forgiveness. Which Prestimion had freely given; and more than that besides. For in the great wiping of the world’s memory Navigorn had lost all recollection of the civil war and his role in it as Prestimion’s enemy, and so he could readily accept Prestimion’s invitation to join his Council, of which he had been a valued member all these years since. Time had turned Navigorn old and gouty and fat, but he had served Prestimion as staunchly as ever he had Korsibar. And here he was now, the one who had volunteered to take on the difficult job of carrying to Prestimion the news that his time as Coronal might nearly be over.
“Do you remember, Prestimion, when we all went to the Labyrinth to wait for Prankipin’s death, and the old man lingered on and on and on and we thought he’d never die? Ah, there was a time!”
“There was a time indeed,” Prestimion said. “How could I forget it?” His mind leaped back across the decades to that great gathering, that shining array of young lords that had assembled in the underground city in the final days of the long reign of Prankipin Pontifex: the flower of Majipoor’s manhood, the princes of the realm, gathering about the dying old man. Among them, thought Prestimion, so many who were destined to die themselves, a year or three later, fighting on behalf of the usurping Korsibar in the needless, foolish war that he had brought upon the world.
Navigorn, lost now in memories, helped himself to more wine without asking. “You came down from the Castle with Serithorn of Samivole, I recall. Septach Melayn was with you, and Gialaurys, and that other friend of yours, that sneaky little man from Suvrael who called himself a duke—what was his name—?”
“Svor.”
“Svor, yes. And then there was good old Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and the Grand Admiral Gonivaul, who had never been to sea, and Duke Oljebbin, and Earl Kamba of Mazadone. Nor should I leave out our vile red-faced friend the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, eh, Prestimion?—and Mandrykarn of Stee—ah, there was a man, that Mandrykarn!—Venta of Haplior, also—” Navigorn shook his head. “And so many of them died young. Wasn’t that strange? Kamba, Mandrykarn, Iram of Normork, Sibellor of Banglecode, and plenty of others besides—dead, all dead, much too soon. More’s the pity, that. Who’d have known, when we were all together at the Labyrinth, that so many of us would be dead so soon afterward?”
It troubled Prestimion that that thought had occurred to Navigorn too. He waited tensely to see if the other man was going to extend the catalog of the dead: to Korsibar, say. Brawny, swaggering Korsibar had been the most conspicuous figure of all at that gathering of lords in the Labyrinth. But Navigorn did not speak Korsibar’s name.
And his reflective mood lifted as quickly as it had come. He smiled, sighed, lifted his wine-bowl in salute. “We had ourselves a time, though—didn’t we, Prestimion? We had ourselves a time!”
Navigorn began to talk now of the games they had held at the Labyrinth while waiting for Prankipin to die: the Pontifical Games, they had called them, the grandest tournament of modern times. “The wrestling between Gialaurys and that ape Farholt—I thought they’d kill each other, do you know? It seems like just yesterday. And the archery—you were in your prime, then, Prestimion, you did tricks with your bow that day that no one had seen before, or since, for that matter. Septach Melayn winning the fencing over Count Farquanor and making him look such a helpless fool in the bargain. And who was it in the saber? A big man, dark hair, very strong. His face is right at the edge of my mind, but his name is gone. Who was that? Do you remember, Prestimion?”
“I may have been elsewhere for the saber matches that day,” Prestimion said, turning away.
“I can still see the rest of the contests so clearly, though. It does seem just like yesterday. Twenty years and more, but just like yesterday!”
Just like yesterday, yes, Prestimion thought.
It had been Korsibar who won the saber contests. He was the big dark-haired man who lurked at the edge of Navigorn’s mind. But all recollection of Korsibar’s identity had long ago b
een edited from Navigorn’s memory, and that of Thismet, Korsibar’s sister, as well, and Prestimion was relieved to see that no recollection of them had crept back into Navigorn in the intervening years.
Nor did Navigorn seem to remember the final dramatic event of those famous Pontifical Games, the morning when the ninety contestants in the jousting had come together in full armor in the Court of Thrones, from which they were supposed to be transported to the Arena as a group. Prince Korsibar had burst into the room shouting the news that death had come at last to the aged Pontifex. The long wait was over. The time finally had come for the changing of the reign, and now the Coronal Lord Confalume would become Pontifex, and Confalume would name as the new Coronal young Prince Prestimion of Muldemar.
Or so everyone expected; but that was not what happened. For a dark cloud of sorcery fell upon the minds of the lords assembled in the Court of Thrones, and when it lifted an incredible scene was revealed. Prince Korsibar, the Coronal’s son, had taken the starburst crown from the startled Hjort who held it and placed it on his own brow, and now was sitting in glory in the place where the Coronal was meant to sit, with his father Confalume, appearing bewildered and almost dazed, seated beside him on the Pontifical throne. And the lords who had conspired with Korsibar to do this thing cried out loudly, “All hail the Coronal Lord Korsibar! Korsibar! Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”