Lord Prestimion

by Robert Silverberg

  “And then the nightmares began,” Thanna said. “She’d sit up screaming, and I’d put the light on and her face would be like the face of someone who had just seen a ghost. Once she jumped up and tore all her nightclothes off, and I could see she was sweating all over her body, so wet it was like she’d gone for a bath. And her teeth chattering loud enough to hear in the next street. All this week she had the nightmares real bad. Most of the time she couldn’t tell me what the dreams had been, just that they were awful. The only one she could remember, it was that a monstrous bug had sat down over her face and started to suck her brain out of her skull, until it was altogether hollow inside. I said it was a sending of some kind, that she ought to go and see a dream-speaker, but of course people like us have no money for dream-speakers, and in any case she didn’t believe she was important enough to be receiving sendings. I never saw anyone so frightened of her dreams.”

  “She told me about them too,” Vardinna said. “Then, the other day, she said she was starting to have the nightmares while she was awake, also. That something would start throbbing inside her head and then she’d see the most horrid visions, right in front of her eyes, even while she was working.”

  To Varaile the head proctor said, “You received no report of any of this, lady?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The fact that one of your housemaids was apparently having a mental breakdown on your premises was something that you never in any way noticed?”

  “Ordinarily I saw very little of Klaristen,” said Varaile coolly. “An upstairs maid in a large household—”

  “Yes. Yes, of course, lady,” said the proctor, looking flustered and even alarmed, as though it was only belatedly dawning on him that he might be seeming to lay some share of responsibility for this thing upon the daughter of Simbilon Khayf.

  Another of the proctors entered now. “We have identities of the dead people,” he announced. “They were visitors from Canzilaine, a man and a wife, Hebbidanto Throle and his wife Garelle. Staying at the Riverwall Inn, they were. An expensive hotel, the Riverwall: only people of some substance would stay there. I’m afraid there will be heavy indemnities to pay, ma’am,” he said, glancing apologetically toward Varaile. “Not that that would be any problem for your father, ma’am, but even so—”

  “Yes,” she said absently. “Of course.”

  Canzilaine! Her father had important factories there. And Hebbidanto Throle: had she ever heard that name before? It seemed to her that she had. The thought came to her that he might have been some executive in her father’s employ, even the manager of one of the Canzilaine operations. Who had come to Stee with his wife on a holiday, perhaps, and had wanted to show her the stupendous mansion of his fabulously wealthy employer—

  It was a chilling possibility. What a sad ending for their journey!

  Eventually the proctors were finished asking questions, at least, and were huddling off in one corner of the library conferring among themselves before leaving. The bodies had been removed from the street outside and two of the gardeners were hosing away the bloodstains. Bleakly Varaile contemplated the tasks immediately ahead of her.

  First, to get a magus in here to purify the house, cleanse it of the stain that was on it now. Suicide was a serious business; it brought down all sorts of darknesses upon a house. Then to track down Klaristen’s family, wherever they might live, and convey condolences and the information that all burial expenses would be paid, along with a substantial gift as an expression of gratitude for the dead girl’s services. Next, to get in touch with someone on her father’s staff in Canzilaine, and have him find out just who Hebbidanto Throle and his wife had been, and where their survivors could be reached, and what sort of consolatory gesture would be appropriate. Some large sum of money at the very least, but perhaps other expressions of sympathy would be required.

  What a mess! What an awful mess!

  She had been very bitter about being left at home while her father went off to the coronation with Count Fisiolo. “The Castle will be too wild and drunken a place this week for the likes of you, young lady,” Simbilon Khayf had said, and that was that. The truth of it, Varaile knew, was that her father wanted to be wild and drunken himself this week, he and his lordly aristocratic friend the foul-mouthed and blasphemous Count Fisiolo, and didn’t care to have her around. So be it: no one, not even his only daughter, ever defied the will of Simbilon Khayf. She had obediently remained behind; and how lucky it was, she thought, that she had been here to cope with this thing today, rather than having left the house and its responsibilities to the servants.

  As the proctors were leaving, the head man said in a low voice to her, “You know, lady, we’ve had several cases like this lately, though nothing quite as bad as this one. There’s some kind of epidemic of craziness going around. You’d do well to keep a close eye on your people here, in case any of the others happens to start going over the edge.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, officer,” said Varaile, though the thought of monitoring the sanity of her staff was unappealing to her.

  The proctors departed. Varaile felt a headache now beginning to come on, but went up to the study to set about what needed to be done. Everything had to be under control before Simbilon Khayf returned from the coronation.

  An epidemic of craziness?

  How odd. But these were unusual times. Even she had felt uncharacteristic moments of depression and even confusion in recent days. Some hormonal thing, she supposed. But moods of that sort had never been a problem for her before.

  She sent for Gawon Barl, the head steward of the house, and asked him to set about arranging for the purification rites immediately. “Also I need to have the address of Klaristen’s father and mother, or some kin of hers, at least,” she said. “And then—these poor people from Canzilaine—”

  4

  Once again the Castle was the scene of coronation games, the second time in the past three years. Once again grandstands had been constructed along three sides of the great sunny greensward that was Vildivar Close, just downhill from the Ninety-Nine Steps. Once again the greatest ones of the realm, the other two Powers and the members of the Council and the earls and dukes and princes of a hundred provinces, were gathered to celebrate the accession of the new king.

  But no one but Prestimion and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn was able to remember those earlier games, the ones that had been held in honor of the Coronal Lord Korsibar, any more than anyone remembered Korsibar himself. The foot races, the jousting, the wrestling, the contests at archery and all the rest—forgotten by winners and losers alike. Removed from memory. Obliterated by Prestimion’s team of sorcerers, acting together in one mighty effort of the magical art. All that had happened in that other round of games had been unhappened. Today’s games were the games of Lord Prestimion, lawful successor to Lord Confalume. Lord Korsibar had never been. Even the sorcerers who had worked the unhappening had had to forget their own deed, by Prestimion’s command.

  “Let the archers come forth!” cried the Master of the Games. Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar held that honorary title this day.

  As the contestants filed onto the field, a little murmur of wonderment went up from the crowd. Lord Prestimion himself was among them.

  No one had expected the new Coronal to be on the field this day. But it should not have been a huge surprise, really. Archery had ever been Prestimion’s great sport: he was a master of the art. And also a man within whose breast the fires of competition burned fiercely at all times. Those who knew him well knew that it would not have been at all like him to pass up a chance to demonstrate his skill. But even so—for the Coronal to compete in his own coronation games—how strange! How unusual!

  Prestimion had gone out of his way today to seem like nothing more than an eager seeker for the prize at archery. He was clad in the royal colors, a close-fitting golden doublet and green breeches, but he wore no circlet about his forehead, nor any other badge of office. Some stranger who had
no idea which of these dozen men who carried bows was Coronal might perhaps have identified him by the look of great presence and authority that had always been the mark of his demeanor; but more likely the short-statured man with the close-cropped dull-yellow hair would have gone unnoticed in that group of robust, heartily athletic men.

  Glaydin, the long-limbed youngest son of Serithorn of Samivole, was the first to shoot. He was a skillful archer, and Prestimion watched approvingly as he let his arrows fly.

  Then came Kaitinimon, the new Duke of Bailemoona, who still wore a yellow mourning band about his arm in honor of his father, the late Duke Kanteverel. Kanteverel had died with Korsibar at the bloody battle of Thegomar Edge; but not even Kaitinimon knew that. That his father was dead, yes, that much he understood. But the true circumstances of Kanteverel’s death were clouded, as were the deaths of all who had fallen in the battles of the civil war, by the pattern of sorcery that Prestimion’s mages had woven around the world.

  That spell of oblivion had been cunningly designed to allow the survivors of the war’s numberless victims to weave explanatory fantasies of their own that would fill the inner void created by the bare knowledge, unadorned by any factual detail, that their kinsmen no longer were among the living. Perhaps Kaitinimon believed that Kanteverel had died of a sudden seizure while visiting his western estates, or that a swamp-fever had taken him off during a tour of the humid south. Whatever it was, it was anything but the truth.

  Kaitinimon handled his bow well. So did the third competitor, the tall hawk-faced forester Rizlail of Megenthorp, who, like Prestimion, had learned the art of bowmanship from the famed Earl Kamba of Mazadone. Then a stir went through the crowd when the next archer stepped forward, for he was one of the two members of the contending group that came from non-human stock, and a Su-Suheris at that, a member of that strange double-headed race that had lately begun to settle in some numbers on Majipoor. His name was announced as Gabin-Badinion.

  How would someone with two heads take proper aim? Might the heads not disagree about the best placement of the bow? But it was no problem, evidently, for Gabin-Badinion. With icy precision he ably filled the inner rings of the target with his shafts, and gave the crowd a brusque two-headed nod by way of acknowledging its applause.

  It was Prestimion’s turn now.

  He carried with him the great bow that Earl Kamba had given him when he was still a boy, a bow so powerful that few grown men could draw it, though Prestimion handled it with ease. In the battles of the civil war he had worked much destruction with this bow; but how much better, he thought, to be employing it in a contest of skill, instead of taking the lives of honorable men!

  Upon reaching the base-line Prestimion paid homage, as all the earlier archers had done, to the high Powers of the Realm who were looking on. He bowed first to the Pontifex Confalume, who was seated in a great gamandrus-wood throne at the center of the grandstand along the right-hand side of Vildivar Close. The ceremony by which a Pontifex chose a new Coronal was essentially one of adoption, and so, by the custom of Majipoor, it was proper for Prestimion now to regard Confalume as his father—his true father was long dead, anyway—and behave with appropriate reverence.

  Prestimion’s next bow of obeisance went to his mother, the Princess Therissa. She sat on a similar throne in the left-hand grandstand, with her predecessor as Lady of the Isle of Sleep, the Lady Kunigarda, beside her. Prestimion swung about then and saluted his own vacant seat in the third grandstand, by way of making an impersonal acknowledgement of the majesty of the Coronal, a gesture to the office itself, not to the man.

  Then he took the great bow firmly in hand, Kamba’s bow, the bow that he had cherished so long. It was a source of distress to Prestimion that the good-hearted, ever-cheerful Kamba, that supreme master of archery, was not here to take part in this contest today. But Kamba was one of those who had thrown in his lot with the usurping Korsibar, and he had died for it, with so many other brave warriors, at Thegomar Edge. The spells of the mages had been able to cause the war itself to be forgotten, but they could not bring fallen soldiers back to life.

  Standing quietly at the base-line, Prestimion held himself altogether still for a time. He was often impulsive, but never when he stood before a target. With narrowed eyes he scrutinized his goal until at last he felt his soul at perfect center. He raised his bow then, and sighted along the waiting shaft.

  “Prestimion! Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” came the cry from a thousand throats.

  Prestimion was aware of that great roar, but it was of no consequence to him just now. The thing that mattered was staying attuned to the task at hand. What pleasure there was in this art! Not that sending a shaft through the air was of any great importance in itself; but to do a thing with supreme excellence, to do it perfectly, whatever that thing might be—ah, there was joy in that!

  He smiled and released his arrow, and watched it travel straight and true to the heart of the target, and heard the satisfying thump as it embedded itself deep.

  “There’s no one to equal him at this, is there?” asked Navigorn of Hoikmar, who was sitting with a group of men of high rank in one of the boxes on the Coronal’s side of the field. “It isn’t fair. He really ought to sit back and let someone else win an archery title, just for once. Quite aside from the fact that it’s of somewhat questionable taste for a Coronal to be competing in his own coronation games.”

  “What, Prestimion sit back and allow another to win?” said the Grand Admiral of the Realm, Gonivaul of Bombifale. Gonivaul, a dour man whose dark beard was so dense and his thick black hair so low across his forehead that the features of his face could scarcely be seen, offered Navigorn a look that was in fact the Grand Admiral’s version of a smile, though a stranger might have taken it to be a scowl. “It’s just not in his nature, Navigorn. He seems a decent well-bred sort, and so he is, but he does insist on winning, does he not? Confalume saw that in him right away, when he was only a boy. Which is why Prestimion rose through the Castle hierarchy as quickly as he did. And why he’s Coronal of Majipoor today.”

  “Look at that, now! He has no shame,” said Navigorn, more in admiration than criticism, as Prestimion split his first arrow with his second. “I knew he’d try that trick again. He does it every time.”

  “I understand from my son,” said Prince Serithorn, “that Prestimion isn’t actually competing for the prize today, but is performing only for the pure pleasure of the art. He’s asked the judges not to calculate his score.”

  “And that means,” Gonivaul said sourly, “that the winner, whoever he turns out to be, must understand that he’s simply the best archer on the field who happens not to be Prestimion.”

  “Which taints the glory of winning a bit, wouldn’t you say?” asked Navigorn.

  “My son Glaydin made a similar comment,” said Serithorn. “But you show the man no mercy. Either he competes and, most likely, wins, or he disqualifies himself and thereby casts a shadow on the winner. So what is he to do?—Pass the wine, will you, Navigorn? Or do you mean to drink it all yourself?”

  “Sorry.” Navigorn handed the flask across.

  On the field, Prestimion was still running through his flamboyant repertoire of fancy shooting, to the accompaniment of uproarious approval from the crowd.

  Navigorn, a powerfully built dark-haired man of impressive stature and confident nature, watched Prestimion’s performance with ungrudging approval. He appreciated excellence wherever he encountered it. And he admired Prestimion immensely. For all his lordly bearing, Navigorn himself had never had royal ambition; but it did please him to be near to the fount of power, and Prestimion had told him just yesterday that he had chosen him to be a member of the incoming Council. That had been unexpected. “You and I have never been particularly close friends,” Prestimion had said. “But I value you for your qualities. We need to come to know each other better, Navigorn.”

  Prestimion at last yielded up his place on the field, to thunderous applau
se. He went running off, grinning, in a bouncy, boyishly jubilant stride. A slim young man wearing tight blue leggings and a brilliant scarlet-and-gold tunic typical of the distant west coast of Zimroel came forth next.

  “He looked so happy just now,” Prince Serithorn observed. “Far more so than he was at the banquet the other night. Did you see how preoccupied he seemed then?”

  “There was a black look about him that night,” said Admiral Gonivaul. “Well, he’s never happier than when he’s at his archery. But perhaps his long face at the banquet was meant to tell us that he’s already begun to take a sober view of what being Coronal actually involves. Not just grand processionals and the cheers of the admiring multitudes. Oh, no, no, no! A lifetime of grueling toil is what’s in store for him now, and the truth of it must be starting to sink in.—You know what ‘toil’ means, don’t you, Serithorn? No, why would you? The word isn’t in your vocabulary”

  “Why should it be?” replied Serithorn, who despite his considerable age was smooth-skinned and trim, an elegant, light-hearted man, one who rejoiced unabashedly in the enormous wealth that had descended to him from a whole host of famous ancestors going back to Lord Stiamot’s time. “What work could I possibly have done? I never thought I had much to offer the world in the way of useful skills. Better to do nothing all one’s life, and do it really well, than to set out to do something and do it badly, eh, my friend? Eh? Let those who are truly capable do the work. Such as Prestimion. He’ll be a marvelous Coronal. Has real aptitude for the job. Or like Navigorn here: a natural-born administrator, a man of genuine ability.—I hear he’s named you to the Council, Navigorn.”

  “Yes. An honor I never sought, but am proud to have received.”

  “Plenty of responsibility, being on the Council, let me tell you. I’ve put in more than my share of time on it. Prestimion’s asked me to stay on, matter of fact. What about you, Gonivaul?”