“Not even a seat on the Council?”
“Not even that. One thing leads to another, they would say: put you on the Council and soon you’d want to act as Regent when I’m away from the Castle, or you would propose yourself as High Counsellor, or you’d even aspire to be made Coronal yourself when my turn arrives to move on to the Labyrinth. I would constantly be forced to defend myself against accusations of—”
“Father?”
“—no end of whispering and innuendo, or outright insurrection, even, if—”
“Father, please.”
Confalume halted in mid-flow, blinking. “Yes?”
“I do understand all these things. I resigned myself long ago to the realities of my situation. Prestimion will be Coronal, not me: so be it. I never expected to be Coronal, never. Nor wanted it, nor hoped for it. But let me bring you back to the point where this wrangling discussion started, if I may. I asked you whether you really believed I was so stupid that the only thing on my mind was the desire to escape the boredom of this miserable hole by getting on a mount and waving my sword around in some tournament, without a scrap of thought given to custom or tradition or propriety.”
The Coronal made no immediate response. His eyes now grew dull with inattention; his face, which had become very grim, seemed to go entirely blank.
At length he said, keeping his voice very low, “Do you resent it that Prestimion is going to become Coronal, Korsibar?”
“Do I envy him, do you mean? Yes. He’ll be a king, and who would not envy the man who is to be king? But as for resenting that he will be Coronal in my place—no. No. That place was never mine to occupy. I know that. There are nine billion men on this planet, and I am the only one of whom it was known, from the moment of his birth, that he could never become Coronal.”
“And does that make you bitter?”
“Why do you keep asking me these things, Father? I understand the law. I yield my nonexistent claim on the throne gladly, unhesitatingly, unconditionally, to Prestimion. All I meant to assert before is that I believe that there’s more substance to me than I’m generally given credit for having, and I wish I could be allowed more responsibilities in the government. Or to be more accurate, be allowed some responsibilities at all.”
Lord Confalume said, “What’s your opinion of Prestimion, actually?”
Now it was Korsibar’s turn to pause awhile before speaking.
“A clever man indeed,” he said cautiously. “Intelligent. Ambitious.”
“Ambitious, yes. But capable?”
“He must be. You’ve chosen him to succeed you.”
“I know what my opinion of Prestimion is. I want to know yours.”
“I admire him. His mind is quick, and for a small man he’s remarkably strong, and exceedingly agile besides. Good with a sword, better even with a bow.”
“But do you like him?”
“No.”
“Honestly put, at any rate. Do you think he’ll make a good Coronal?”
“I hope so.”
“We all hope so, Korsibar. Do you think so?”
Another pause. After that moment of deep fatigue, Lord Confalume’s eyes had regained their usual brightness; they searched Korsibar’s mercilessly.
“Yes. Yes, I think he probably will.”
“Probably, you say.”
“I’m no soothsayer, Father. I can only guess at what is to come.”
“Indeed.—The Procurator, you know, thinks that you’re Prestimion’s sworn enemy.”
A muscle throbbed in Korsibar’s cheek. “Is that what he’s told you?”
“Not in so many words. I refer to his comment of a little while ago, upstairs, about your opposing the games because holding them was Prestimion’s idea.”
“Dantirya Sambail is a dangerous troublemaker, Father.”
“Agreed. But also a very shrewd man. Are you Prestimion’s sworn enemy?”
“If I were, Father, would I tell you? But no. No. I’ve been frank with you about Prestimion. I think he’s a calculating and manipulative man, a cunning opportunist who can argue on either side of an issue with equal skill, and who has maneuvered himself up out of no position at all and now is about to attain the second highest rank on Majipoor. I find it hard to like men of that sort. But that isn’t to say that he doesn’t deserve the second highest rank on Majipoor. He understands the art of governing better than most Certainly better than I. Prestimion will become Coronal, and so be it, and I will bow my knee to him like everyone else.—This is an ugly conversation, Father. Are these the things you called me here to talk about?”
“Yes.”
“And the conjuring you were doing when I came in? What was that?”
The Coronal’s hands moved flutteringly among the devices on his desk. “An attempt, merely, to determine how much longer the Pontifex is likely to live.”
Korsibar smiled. “Are you really so adept a sorcerer now, Father?”
“Adept? No, that’s not a claim I’d make. But, like many others, I’ve made a study of the art. I keep measuring my skills against events as they unfold, to see whether I’ve actually mastered any knack of foretelling the future.”
“And have you? You have the true oracular skill, do you think?” Korsibar thought of the reports of him that the sorcerers were said to have brought to his father, that strange prediction: He will shake the world. Perhaps it was the Coronal himself who had cast that rune, and now was staring at some singular destiny for his son that Korsibar himself had no way of seeing. “Can we put it to the test?” he asked, happy to see the subject of discussion changing. “Tell me your results, and we’ll see what comes to pass. What is the date that you arrived at for the end of Prankipin’s lingering?”
“Not any precise one. I’m not that good: perhaps no one is. But it will come, I calculate, within the next nineteen days. Let us keep count, you and I, Korsibar.”
“Nineteen days, or even less. And then finally all the waiting will be over, and we can have the ceremonies and Prestimion will be Coronal and you will be Pontifex, and we can all get out of this vile cistern of a place and back to the sweet air of Castle Mount.—All but you, Father,” Korsibar added in a softer voice.
“All but me, yes. The Labyrinth will be my home now.”
“And how do you feel about that, may I ask?”
“I’ve had forty years to get myself used to the idea,” Lord Confalume said. “I am indifferent to it.”
“Never to emerge into the light of day—never to see the Castle again—”
The Coronal chuckled. “Oh, I can come forth now and then, if I feel like it. Prankipin did, you know. You were only a boy the last time he did: perhaps you’ve forgotten it. But the Pontifex isn’t compelled to stay belowground one hundred percent of the time.”
“Still, I wouldn’t care for it even so much as one percent of the time. My stay here these weeks past has been quite enough for me.”
Lord Confalume smiled. “Luckily for you, Korsibar, living here won’t ever be asked of you. The best part of not becoming Coronal is that you know you’ll never become Pontifex.”
“I should be grateful, then.”
“You should.”
“And you feel you are ready to take up your new life down here, Father?”
“Yes. Completely ready.”
“You will be a great Pontifex,” said Korsibar. “As you were a great Coronal.”
“I thank you for those words,” said Lord Confalume. He smiled; he stood. It was a tight, unreal smile, and the Coronal’s left hand, clenched at his side, was trembling perceptibly. Something was being left unsaid: something painful to the Coronal, something explosive.
What did the Coronal know, what was it that the Coronal had refrained from telling him?
You will shake the world.
It had to have to do with that. But whatever Sanibak-Thastimoon had imagined that Lord Confalume might be going to say to him concerning that mysterious oracular uttering had not been mentio
ned.
Nor would it be, now. Korsibar was aware that he had been dismissed. He made the formal starburst gesture before his father as Coronal; and then they embraced as father and son, and he turned to leave. He heard the Coronal once again puttering among the geomantic devices on his desk even before he stepped through the doorway.
4
Septach Melayn entered the room known as the Melikand Chamber, a narrow curving hall in the imperial sector of the Labyrinth, adjacent to Prestimion’s suite of rooms, that had been set aside for the use of the companions of the Coronal-designate. Duke Svor and Gialaurys of Piliplok were already there. “Well,” said Septach Melayn as he came in, “I have a little news, at least. Three names have now emerged as candidates for Master of the Games: the Grand Admiral, the Procurator, and our little friend Svor. Or so I have it from one of the Pontifical lackeys.”
“Who is a person whom you trust implicitly, I suppose?” Svor asked.
“As much as I would trust my mother,” replied Septach Melayn. “Or yours, if I had ever had the pleasure of knowing her.” He drew his ornately embroidered cloak, dark blue silk lined with lashings of silver thread, tight about him, and paced with the catlike lazy grace that was his manner up and down the brightly burnished floor of smooth gray stone in quick, almost mincing steps. As he moved about, Svor and Gialaurys looked at him in their varying ways—Svor with wry amusement, Gialaurys with his usual melancholy suspicion of Septach Melayn’s elegance and flamboyance.
They were oddly assorted men, these three dearest friends of the Coronal-designate. In no way did they resemble one another, neither in physique nor manner nor temperament. Septach Melayn was slim and lanky, with arms and legs so exorbitantly long that they seemed almost attenuated. His humor was volatile, his style delicate and witty. His skin was very fair and his eyes were a pale glittering blue; his golden hair tumbled in carefully constructed ringlets to his shoulders, in what was almost a girlish way; and he affected a small pointed beard and a dandyish little mustache, a mere chiseled line of gold on his upper lip, that were the cause of much knightly amusement behind his back—though never to his face, for Septach Melayn was ever quick to challenge slights and was a relentless foe in any sword-fight.
Gialaurys, on the other hand, was a man of ponderous mass, not unusually tall, but extraordinarily thick through the chest and shoulders, with a flat, wide face that confronted the world with a look of the utmost steadiness, like a side of beef. His upper arms were the width of another man’s thighs; his fingers had the thickness of fat sausages; his dark hair was close-cropped and his face was clean-shaven except for bristly brown sideburns that descended in thick ominous stripes past his cheekbones.
He too had a reputation as one to be treated with caution—not that he was a swordsman of Septach Melayn’s wicked skill, but so great was his physical strength that no opponent could withstand his anger. Gialaurys was dark and brooding in temperament, as befitted one whose foster kin in the unlovely city of Piliplok in Zimroel, the land of his birth, had been a family of bleak-spirited Skandars. Prestimion had met him in Piliplok on his one visit to the western continent, ten years earlier, and by some unpredictable affinity of opposites they had become fast friends at once.
As for Svor, who held the title of Duke of Tolaghai but had no land or wealth to go with it, he was no more than a speck beside the other two: a flimsy, frail little man of inconsequential size, swarthy almost to the point of blackness, as men born under the terrible sun of the southernmost continent often are, with an unruly tangle of dark hair and dark, mischievous eyes, and a dark, tangled soul. His nose was thin and sharp and sly, with a hook to it, and his mouth was too narrow for all his teeth, and a short tight beard rimmed his face, though he kept his upper lip shorn. No warrior was Svor, but a politician and schemer and avid lover of women, who dabbled somewhat in sorcery on the side.
In years gone by he had been a companion of the young Korsibar—a kind of pet, in a way, or court jester, whom the big athletic prince liked to keep about him for amusement’s sake—but once Prestimion had begun to emerge as the probable next Coronal, Svor drifted ever so subtly in his direction, until by now he was a constant figure in Prestimion’s entourage. The shift of allegiance was a fact much remarked upon at the Castle—again, only in private—as an example of Svor’s well-known passion for sen-aggrandizement and of his expedient looseness of loyalty.
Utterly different though the three men might be from one another, a curious bond of mutual affection linked them all, and each in his way was devoted to the welfare and service of Prestimion. No one doubted that they would emerge as the high lords of the kingdom once Prestimion wore the starburst crown.
Septach Melayn said, “If we speak up now in this business of who is to preside over the games, we might well be able to influence the choice. But does it matter to us?”
“It matters to me,” said Gialaurys unhesitatingly, “and it should to you.” He spoke in the flat broad accent of eastern Zimroel that seemed so comical elsewhere, but not when it came from Gialaurys’s lips, and his voice was a deep gritty rumble that seemed to rise up out of the core of the world. “The Master of the Games determines the pairings. Are you willing to be sent into the field against a series of fools because the Master wishes to embarrass you with mismatches? I don’t want the Master using the games to play games of his own. And whenever there’s a close call in some contest, we want our own man to be the one who decides the fine points. Lives can depend on it.”
“Then you would advise us to put our support behind Duke Svor, I take it,” Septach Melayn said.
“Declined,” said Duke Svor instantly from the far corner of the room, where he was engaged in a study of esoteric charts inscribed on long rolls of tawny parchment. “I have no idea what the proper pairings ought to be, and—”
“We could tell you,” Gialaurys said.
“—and in any event,” Svor continued, “I want no part of your silly brawls. The contending sides will forever be shouting in the Master’s face; let it be someone else’s face.”
Septach Melayn smiled. “Very well, Svor. Let it be so.” Playfully he said to Gialaurys, “And what do you mean, pray tell, by ‘our own man’? Do we have factions here, so that someone can be considered plainly to be Prestimion’s man, and someone might be considered altogether unfriendly to him? Are we not all united in the celebration of the new reign?”
“You talk like a fool,” Gialaurys grunted.
Septach Melayn was unbothered by that. “Surely you’d consider Svor to be our own man, if anyone is; I understand that. But is the Procurator our enemy? Or Admiral Gonivaul?”
“They might be. Either one.”
“I fail to understand you.”
“There’s never a smooth transition from reign to reign. There are always those who have objection, secret or otherwise, to the chosen new Coronal. And may show their objections in unexpected ways.”
“Listen to him!” Septach Melayn cried. “The scholar! The learned historian! Give me examples of such treachery, friend Gialaurys!”
“Well—” Gialaurys pondered for a while, sucking his lower lip deep into his mouth. “When Havilbove became Pontifex,” he said after a long while, “and he said that Thraym would be his Coronal, I understand it that some disgruntled lord who bore no love for Thraym launched a conspiracy to put Dizimaule on the throne instead of him, and very nearly—”
“In fact Lord Kanaba was Havilbove’s Coronal,” said Svor quietly. “Thraym was Coronal three reigns later. Dizimaule lived a thousand years earlier than any of them.”
“So I forget the true names or the order of the kings,” Gialaurys said, with some heat in his tone now. “But it happened all the same, if not with them, then with others. You could look it up. And then there was another case, involving Spurifon, I think, or was it Siminave—”
“All this thinking ill becomes you,” Septach Melayn said, and grinned into the back of his beautifully manicured hand. “I assure you
, dear friend, that regardless of the private ambitions of the rejected candidates, the new Coronal is always swept up into office by wholehearted acclamation. It has never been any other way. We are a civilized people on this world.”
“Are we?” said Prestimion, coming into the room just then. “How good to hear you say so, sweet Septach Melayn. What are you discussing, may I ask?”
“Whom to choose to be Master of the Games. I’m told that it’s between Gonivaul and Svor and your dear cousin the Procurator. Gialaurys has been arguing that we can’t trust anybody but ourselves even in something like the games, and wants Svor to be Master so that we can be sure that we’ll be put up against the proper people to fight, and that the verdicts will all come down in our favor.”
Prestimion glanced at Gialaurys. “Is this so? Are you so apprehensive, Gialaurys?”
“Septach Melayn twists my words, as usual, my lord. But if it’s put to me all over again, yes: I would prefer someone I trust as Master to someone that I don’t.”
“And you trust Svor?” Prestimion said, laughing.
“Svor has already said he will not be it. In that case I would like to see the Procurator Dantiya Sambail given the post.”
“The Procurator!” Prestimion cried, bursting into laughter all over again. “The Procurator! You would trust the Procurator, Gialaurys!”
“He’s a cousin of yours, my lord, is he not?” said Gialaurys stolidly. “And therefore would make no decision harmful to you or to your friends, or so I would assume.”
“He is a cousin much removed,” Prestimion answered, as he often did when his relationship to the Procurator was mentioned to him. “And you’ve called me ‘my lord’ twice now in half a minute’s time. That term belongs to Lord Confalume, at least until a new Coronal has been chosen.—As for my cousin the Procurator, he is truly my kinsman, yes. But if you think you might have anything to fear from the one who is chosen Master of the Games, I would suggest that you throw your support to someone other than he.”
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