Sorcerers of Majipoor m-4

by Robert Silverberg

  “And why, I wonder, does the good Korsibar object to beginning the games?” Dantirya Sambail asked the Coronal. “I would think he’d be more eager than any man here to get them under way.” A lively glint of mischief flickered suddenly across those beguilingly poetic eyes. “Can the problem be simply that the idea came from Prince Prestimion, perhaps?”

  Even Lord Confalume was startled into silence by the audacity of that remark.

  There had lately sprung up a certain unvoiced tension, to be sure, between Korsibar and Prestimion. Here was Korsibar on the one hand, the Coronal’s only son and a man of lordly grace in his own right, respected and even beloved throughout the land, but he was barred by age-old custom from succeeding his father on the throne; and here on the other was Prestimion, far less grand by birth and much less imposing in his person, who in all probability would be the outgoing Coronal’s choice as his successor. There were those who privately regretted the constitutional necessities that would block Korsibar from taking possession of the Coronal’s seat when shortly it became vacant. No one spoke openly of that, though: no one. Especially not in the presence of Korsibar, and Prestimion, and Lord Confalume himself.

  Prestimion, who had remained silent since his entry into the room, now said mildly, “If I may speak, my lord?”

  Confalume, in what was very nearly an absentminded way, granted permission with a wave of his left hand.

  The prince was a compact, trimly built man of surprisingly small stature but extraordinary physical strength. His hair was of a golden tone but without much sheen, and he wore it cut short, an unfashionable style in these years. His eyes were of unusual keenness and intensity, light greenish-blue in color and set perhaps a shade too close together; his face was pale and narrow, his lips thin.

  It was easy to overlook Prestimion in any gathering of the princes of Castle Mount because of his unprepossessing size; but what he lacked in height he made up for in agility, muscular power, innate shrewdness, and energy. In Prestimion’s childhood and even in young manhood no one would have predicted any sort of distinction of rank for him; but gradually, in recent years, he had moved to a position of preeminence at the court of the Coronal. By now he was widely recognized throughout the precincts of the Castle as the Coronal-designate, though only unofficially, for it would not have been appropriate for Lord Confalume to make that choice formally known while the old Pontifex was still alive.

  Coolly, the prince acknowledged the Coronal’s permission to speak. The undiplomatic and indeed flagrantly provocative words of his kinsman of Ni-moya did not appear to have ruffled Prestimion in any way. But, then, he rarely appeared to be ruffled by anything. He gave the impression always of being governed by premeditation, a man who took no action without much thought and calculation. Even Prestimion’s most impulsive moments—and there were many of them—often somehow aroused the suspicion in those who did not entirely admire him that they had been planned.

  He offered a calm smile to Korsibar and another to the Procurator, and said, addressing his words to nobody in particular, “What is it, after all, that we commemorate in the games that we traditionally hold upon the death of a Pontifex? The end of a great monarch’s life, yes, to be sure. But also the commencement of a new reign, the advancement of a distinguished Coronal to the even higher authority of the Pontificate, the selection of a promising prince of the realm as the world’s Coronal Lord. One cycle closes, another begins. Therefore the games should have a double purpose: to welcome the new monarchs of the world to their seats, yes, but also to celebrate the life of the one who is leaving us. And so I feel that it is right and proper and natural to embark on the games while Prankipin still lives. By doing so we create a bridge between the old reign and the new one.”

  He ceased to speak, and the room was utterly still.

  Then the quiet was broken by the sharp sound of Dantirya Sambail’s loudly clapping hands.

  “Bravo, cousin Muldemar! Bravo! Brilliantly argued! My vote is for the games, at once! And what does the fastidious Korsibar have to say?”

  Korsibar, his dark eyes smoldering with only partly suppressed rage, glowered at the Procurator.

  “I would be pleased to start the games this very afternoon, if that be the sense of the group,” he said tautly. “I never voiced any objection to that. I simply raised the question of propriety. Of unseemly haste, shall we say?”

  “And that question has been prettily disposed of by Prince Prestimion,” said Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar. “So be it. I move the question, my lord. I further suggest that we announce the games to the citizens of the Labyrinth not as funeral games but merely as games held in honor of our beloved Pontifex.”

  “Agreed,” Korsibar said.

  “Do I hear opposition?” Lord Confalume asked. “No. Good. So be it. Make your preparations, gentlemen, for what we will call the Pontifical Games. The ancient and traditional Pontifical Games. By the Divine, who’ll know there’s never been such a thing before? It’s forty years and some since last a Pontifex has died, and who will remember how these matters are supposed to go, and of those who remember, who will dare speak out, eh?” The Coronal smiled broadly, letting his gaze rest on each member of the company in turn; only when he came to Dantirya Sambail did it seem as if the warmth of his smile cooled somewhat. Then he made as though to leave; but, pausing at the place where the room gave way to the vestibule he looked back at his son and said, “Korsibar, attend me in my suite in ten minutes, if you please.”

  2

  Reports of the Pontifex’s critical condition had traveled all up and down the immensity of Majipoor, from city to city and shore to shore—from the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount throughout all of far-spreading Alhanroel, and across the Inner Sea to the Isle of Sleep from which the beloved Lady sent forth her soothing dreams, and farther west to the giant cities of the younger and wilder continent Zimroel, and downward into the torrid zone and the hot dry wastelands of the southern continent, Suvrael. The Pontifex is dying! The Pontifex is dying! And there was scarcely anyone, among all of Majipoor’s innumerable billions of people, who did not in some way feel uneasiness over the consequences of his death. For there was hardly anyone alive who was able to remember a time when Prankipin had not occupied one or the other of Majipoor’s two thrones; and who knew what would life be without him?

  Indeed, fear was general in the land: fear of the dismantling of hierarchies, the disruption of order, the unleashing of chaos. It was so long since a change in the government had occurred that the people had forgotten how strong the bonds of tradition can be. Anything seemed possible once the old emperor was gone; they feared the worst, some dire transformation of the world that would engulf land and sea and farthest heaven.

  An abundance of sorcerers and mages stood ready on all sides to guide them in this difficult moment. The time of the Pontifex Prankipin was a time when sorcery had flourished and proliferated luxuriantly on Majipoor.

  No one could have expected, when the strapping young Duke Prankipin of Halanx became Coronal long ago, that ultimately he would cause the world to be inundated by a flood of wizardry and magic. The occult arts had always been a significant element in the life of Majipoor, most notably in the area of the interpretation of dreams. But until Prankipin’s time it was only the lower levels of society that had embraced such arcane disciplines as lay beyond simple dream-speaking: that huge population of fishermen and weavers and gatherers of wood, of dyers and chariot-makers and potters and smiths, of sausage-sellers and barbers and slaughterers and acrobats and jugglers and boatmen and peddlers of dried sea-dragon meat, that formed the broad base of the giant planet’s bustling economy.

  Curious cults had always thrived among such people—strange beliefs, often savage and violent, in powers and forces beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. The believers in these things had their prophets and their shamans, yes, and their amulets and their talismans, and their feasts and rituals and processions; and those who dwelled in the loftier re
gions of Majipoori life, the merchants and manufacturers and the members of the aristocracy above them, saw no serious harm in any of that. Perhaps, they said, there might even be some value in it for the poor folk who had faith in such things. On the other hand, very few of those more prosperous people tended to dabble themselves in what they regarded as the fantasies and superstitions of the lower classes.

  But the Coronal Lord Prankipin’s enlightened trade policies had led Majipoor into a splendid golden age of economic expansion that brought widespread abundance of wealth at every level of society; and with increasing affluence often comes increased insecurity and fear of losing what one has attained. Such feelings frequently breed a longing for supernatural protection. The new wealth also brought an increase in self-indulgence, a hatred of boredom and a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment with novel and remarkable things.

  What had come to Majipoor also, with the access of this new prosperity, was not only greater credulity, but also a certain measure of greed, dishonesty, sloth, cruelty, debauchery, a love of wild excess and luxury, and other such vices for which the big planet had not been particularly known before. These things too created changes in Majipoori society.

  So a fascination with the occult spread upward in Lord Prankipin’s time to the propertied classes, fostered by the multitudes of nonhuman Vroon and Su-Suheris folk, who arrived on Majipoor at this time—both of them much given to the practice of the mantic and prognostic arts. And through the devices and cunning of these sorcerers, people who were already eager for miracles were made to see not only the shape of things to come, but also a great host of wonders, gorgons and cockatrices, salamanders and winged serpents, feathered basilisks that spit hissing flame; and they were allowed to look through chasms of dark smoke and doors of white fire into universes beyond the universe, and the domains of all manner of gods and demigods and demons. Or so it seemed, to those who had faith in the evidence of what was before their eyes, though there were those skeptics that said it was all a fraud and a snare and a delusion. But the number of those sour cold-eyed onlookers grew ever fewer all the time.

  Amulets and talismans were worn everywhere, and the scent of incense was ubiquitous in the land, and brisk trade was done in ointments with which to anoint doorposts and thresholds against the forces of evil. Also it became the fashion among certain of the newly rich to consult soothsayers concerning matters of business and investment, and then the more respectable of the new cults and mysteries received the approbation also of the educated and nobly born. The women of the aristocracy, and soon afterward the men as well, began to hire personal astrologers and seers; and ultimately Lord Prankipin himself gave his formal blessing to many of these exotic predilections by devoting more and more of his time to the company of mages, diviners, thaumaturges, and the like. His court came to have a full complement of sorcerers and wizards, whose wisdom was regularly employed in the course of governmental business.

  By the time Lord Prankipin had moved on to the Labyrinth to assume the duties of Pontifex, and Confalume succeeded him as Coronal, these policies were too deeply entrenched for anyone, even the new Coronal, to speak out against them. Whether the new Lord Confalume maintained the occult disciplines in their supremacy at first out of inner conviction or mere shrewd tolerance of the status quo, was something that he had never revealed even to his closest advisers; but as the years passed he became as wholehearted an advocate of the wiz-ardly philosophies as ever Prankipin had been. With Pontifex and Coronal united on this point, sorcery was a universal practice on Majipoor now.

  And so, in this uncertain time, a good many practitioners of dark arts that once might have been deemed curious and strange indeed were available to offer strange and curious consolations to the millions—the billions—of frightened citizens whose souls were uneasy over what might be about to happen.

  * * *

  In Sisivondal, the busy mercantile center through which all the overland caravans of western Alhanroel passed on their way to the wealthy cities of Castle Mount, the Mystery of the Beholders was the rite by which the people hoped to hold back the dread demons that might burst loose at the hour of the Pontifex’s death.

  No visitors came to Sisivondal for its beauty or its elegance. It was set in the midst of a bare featureless plain. One could set out from it and travel a thousand miles in any direction and see nothing but dry, dusty, flat lands. It was a flat dull city in the midst of a flat dull region, and its only distinction was that it was a place where a dozen major highways met.

  Like the spokes of a giant wheel were the wide roads that crossed those dreary plains to intersect here, one coming in from the major port of Alaisor to the west, three running down from the north, three from the south, and no less than five connecting Sisivondal with mighty Castle Mount off in the distant east. The boulevards and avenues of Sisivondal were laid out as concentric circles that allowed easy connection from any of the incoming highways to any other. All along the streets that ran between the circular avenues were rows of flat-roofed nine-storied warehouses,, each very much like its neighbor, in which goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent could temporarily be stored.

  It was an uninteresting but necessary place, and its appearance was in keeping with its function. Located as it was in a district of Alhanroel where little rain fell except for a couple of months in the winter, Sisivondal did without the grand and lavish ornamental gardens that were a distinctive mark of nearly all the cities of Majipoor. The monotony of its broad bare streets, dry and dusty under the constant golden-green eye of the sun, was relieved here and there only by plantings of rugged undemanding shrubs and trees, usually arrayed in long regular rows along the curbsides: squat thick-trunked camaganda palms with drooping grayish-purple fronds, somber lumma-lumma bushes that looked like boulders with leaves and grew so slowly they might just as well have been carved from stone, and spiky garavedas that flowered only once every hundred years, each one sending up a single ominous black spike three times the height of a man.

  No, not a pretty city. But here the cult of the Beholders had taken root, and the Beholders, when they held the Procession of their Mysteries, did indeed bring for a brief time an unfamiliar beauty to the drab streets of Sisivondal.

  They came forth now, dancing and singing and chanting as they marched past the long stolid rows of identical warehouses that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue. At the head of the procession ran scores of young women in immaculate white garments who strewed the ground with the bright crimson-and-gold petals of halatinga blossoms that had been brought in at monumental expense from Castle Mount. Young men with sparkling mirrors sewn to their jerkins danced after them, sprinkling the streets with balsams and unguents. Next came the massed ranks of sturdy chanters, accompanied by the shrill cries of pipes and flutes as they bellowed over and over, “Make way for the holy things! Make way! Make way!”

  Now, marching by herself, there advanced the terrifying figure of a giantess in red boots with soles a foot thick, carrying an enormous two-headed wooden staff that she gripped with both her hands and raised again and again above her head. To her huge shoulders a pair of powerful dark wings was strapped, which fluttered slowly in time to the pounding rhythms of two masked drummers who followed her at a respectful distance. Behind this group came initiates of the cult, walking six abreast, their faces hidden by loose black veils. Their heads had been shaven closely and waxed, those of men and women both, so that the tops of their skulls rose above the swirling veils like domes of polished marble.

  Those in the forefront of this group bore the seven artifacts that the Beholders held to be among their most sacred possessions, things which they displayed only at occasions of the highest gravity. One held aloft an elaborately carved stone lamp of curious design, from which a fearsome, roaring yellow-tipped flame spurted far into the sky; the next, a palm branch interwoven with strands of gold in the form of a coiling serpent with gaping jaws; the one beyond that, the giant image of a
disembodied human hand with the middle finger bent backward in an impossible and menacing way; then a fourth with a silver urn in the shape of a woman’s breast, from which he poured an inexhaustible stream of steaming, fragrant golden milk into the streets; and a fifth with a huge fan made of wood, which he swept from side to side in a manner that caused onlookers at the edge of the throng to leap back in fright. A sixth bore the effigy of a plump little pink-fleshed deity whose face had no features, and a seventh came staggering along under the weight of a monstrous male genital organ carved from a long curving slab of purple wood.

  “Behold and worship!” the marchers cried.

  And from the onlookers came an answering cry: “We behold! We behold!”

  More dancers followed—frenzied ones now, in a delirious, ecstatic furor, leaping crazily from one side of the street to another as though tongues of flame were bursting from the pavement all about them, and uttering brief wordless cries like the yippings of demented beasts. They moved on, giving way to a pair of grim towering Skandars who carried slung between them on a stout wooden pole the Ark of the Mysteries, said to contain the most potent and holy objects of the cult, though these would not be revealed to anyone until the final hours of the world.

  And then, at last, borne on a resplendent gleaming cart of ebony inlaid with silver, came the terrifying figure of the high priest, the masked Messenger of the Mysteries. He was a slim naked man of phenomenal height whose rippling body was painted black down one side and gold down the other; he wore over his head the carved visage of a furious-looking yellow-eyed hound with fierce elongated muzzle and long narrow ears standing stiffly erect; and he held in one hand a narrow staff around which golden serpents with swollen necks and red staring eyes were entwined, and in the other a leather whip.