Duke Svor, urgently grasping Prestimion’s arm, said once again, “This needs to be stopped, prince!”
“Yes. I agree.” He looked across to the royal box and called out to the Coronal to bring an end to the contest. Lord Confalume nodded. He signaled to Gonivaul.
From the box on the far side, though, came the jeering voice of Dantirya Sambail: “Ah, I pray you, let it continue, Cousin Prestimion! There’s such pleasure in seeing two brave strong men having at it this way!”
As for Prince Gonivaul, he was looking down at the wrestling ring in a detached, almost absent way, as if he were contemplating creatures swimming in some pond in a valley far below him. He stroked his thick beard reflectively, he ran his fingers through the furry hair that tumbled across his forehead; but he offered no response to the Coronal’s order. It seemed only now to have come to Prince Gonivaul’s attention that anything was going on in the ring at all.
As Gonivaul stood there hesitating, Farholt and Gialaurys came rumbling slowly back toward each other from opposite corners of the ring. They arrived simultaneously at its center and each man, breathing heavily, reached one hand tentatively out toward the other in an uncertain probing way.
They looked like two drunkards far gone in their cups. There was no vitality in their movements. Plainly both of them were at the verge of collapse. Gialaurys touched his fingertips lightly to Farholt’s chest and pushed; Farholt swayed and seemed almost to totter, and took two faltering steps backward.
Then he shambled forward again and reached out to give Gialaurys a similar shove. It was Gialaurys’s turn to sway and totter. The two men seemed dazed, at the last extremity of exhaustion. Now Gialaurys shoved again, not at all vigorously, and this time Farholt crumpled immediately to the ground. Gialaurys dropped down on top of him, looking barely conscious as he lay across Farholt’s chest in a groggy travesty of a grip.
Hayla Tekmanot, kneeling beside them, gave Gialaurys the slap of victory in this fall. Then the referee looked up at Prince Gonivaul’s box.
“One fall to Gialaurys and one to Farholt,” he said, “and the first one a draw. So it is an even split, and they are in no condition to continue.”
“Is that your opinion?” Gonivaul asked sternly.
Hayla Tekmanot gestured to the two motionless sprawled figures in the ring. “You see them there before you, prince.”
Prince Gonivaul appeared for some while to be debating within himself the likelihood of somehow continuing the match. Then he said at last, “Very well. We divide the prize. They are each equal champions in this contest.”
Gialaurys rose uncertainly, Farholt a moment later. They stood wobbling in the ring, blinking slowly, as Hayla Tekmanot explained to them the decision of the Master of the Games. With visible reluctance they touched hands; and then they swung about and made their separate ways out of the ring, walking very carefully, as though they were in some danger of falling again.
Gialaurys was undergoing repair by one of the surgeons of the games when Prestimion and his companions arrived in the dressing-room. He looked battered and woebegone, and his nose seemed somewhat out of proper line, but he was conscious and even managed a feeble smile as Prestimion entered.
“How badly are you hurt?” Prestimion asked anxiously.
“Everything bruised and somewhat bent, nothing broken, no permanent harm done.” Gialaurys spoke thickly through swollen lips. “But I will tell you straight out that I’ve had gentler ticklings than this one. What do you hear of Farholt? Did he survive?”
“It would seem so,” answered Septach Melayn.
“A pity,” said Gialaurys. “He wrestles in a most unchivalrous way. This was not how I was taught to play the sport.”
Prestimion put his head close and said in a low tone, “Tell me this, Gialaurys: what was the thing Farholt whispered to you, as you stood face-to-face with him at the beginning of the first bout? It seemed to amaze you greatly, and then to make you angry.”
“Oh,” said Gialaurys. “That.” His broad face darkened with a deep frown, which plainly cost him some pain. Slowly he shook his head. “It was a very odd thing, Prestimion. What Farholt said to me was that I was your man—which is true enough—and that he hated all that had to do with you, and therefore would destroy me this day. As he then proceeded nearly to do, when I thought we were only there to wrestle. But he got from me as good as he gave, I think, and perhaps a little more than that.”
“He said that? That he hates all that has to do with me?”
“Those were his words, yes. And would destroy me because I am your man.”
“We have become two camps already, the camp of Korsibar and the camp of Prestimion,” said Duke Svor in a black, dismal voice. “If the wrestling is like this, what will the boxing be, and the jousting? We’ll swim in blood before this all is over.”
“How strange,” Prestimion said, addressing Gialaurys, just as though Svor had not spoken. “How extremely strange, that Farholt would say such a thing.” He glanced about at the others. Septach Melayn’s face was more somber than usual, and his left hand was uneasily caressing the hilt of the little dress-sword that he had chosen to wear today. As for Duke Svor, his dark eyes had become hard and bleak, and he was looking at Prestimion in a way that communicated the deepest foreboding. “How strange,” said Prestimion once more.
9
The games were now approaching their midway point; and still the old Pontifex lived on. Korsibar, calling upon the Coronal in his suite, said, “This is the eighteenth day since that time when I visited you here, Father, and you told me then that Prankipin would be dead within nineteen.”
“He lingers and lingers, I know,” said Lord Confalume.
“Not that I doubt your skill at prognostication. But even the greatest sages have occasionally made errors of calculation. What if he lives another ten days, or twenty?”
“Why, then, the waiting will go on.”
“And the games? We’re nearly half done with them. Tomorrow will be the archery; the day after tomorrow, the fencing; after that the mounted jousting; then the boxing, then the chariot-racing and we’re done and there must be a grand celebration, with feasting and the bestowing of prizes. This is the problem I saw from the first, Father. How can we have a grand celebration, with feasting and parades and all, with Prankipin still on his deathbed? We said when the decision to begin was agreed upon that we’d draw the games out so that they wouldn’t finish until after the Pontifex had died. But it may not happen that way.”
“I made my calculation again last night,” said the Coronal. “It was not perfectly correct before, though close. Now I have more confidence. The Pontifex will die within five days.”
“How certain are you?”
“The calculation of my experts is the same as mine.”
“Ah.”
“And, I suspect, that of the Pontifex’s own mages also, though they’ve said nothing on the subject these four days past. But their very silence and withdrawal is suspicious.”
“Within five days,” said Korsibar. “And then you’ll be Pontifex at last. After all these years on the other throne.”
“After all these years, yes.”
“And Prestimion will be our Coronal.”
“Yes,” Lord Confalume said. “Prestimion.”
* * *
The next day was the day of the archery contests. This was Prestimion’s particular sport, in which he had always excelled beyond all measure, and no one expected to best him at it. But a contest needs contestants; and so a dozen of the finest archers of the realm gallantly stepped up to the mark alongside the Prince of Muldemar to try their skill.
Count Iram of Normork went first, and acquitted himself creditably enough, after which Mandrykarn of Stee managed a comparable score, and Navigorn of Hoikmar bettered that by some. The next to shoot was the bluff, hearty Earl Kamba of Mazadone, Prestimion’s own teacher at the art. Kamba, discharging one arrow after another while scarcely seeming to look at his targe
t, swiftly filled the eye at the center with his shafts, doffed his cap to the royal box, and merrily left the field.
Now Prestimion stepped forward. The targets were cleared, and he nocked the first of his arrows. His style was very little like Kamba’s: he studied the target with care, rocked back and forth a few times on his heels, finally lifted the bow and drew and sighted along it and let fly.
The Lady Thismet, who had come to the games this day and was seated beside her brother in the Coronal’s otherwise empty box, felt a shiver of reluctant admiration as Prestimion’s arrow completed its flawless journey. She had no liking for the man but she could not deny his skill. It was a pretty sport, archery, a proper mix of art and bodily coordination and keenness of sight, very much more to her liking than such foolish measures of brute strength as the hammer-toss and certainly more pleasing than wrestling. Her lady-of-honor Melithyrrh had been to see the vile contest between Gialaurys and Farholt, and had tried to tell her of it, with much emphasis on the ferocity and the gore, but Thismet had cut her off after no more than five sentences.
There Prestimion stood at the baseline, trim and lean and so unexpectedly short—she was always surprised to discover how short he was, only a few inches taller than she was herself—but the breadth of his shoulders spoke of the strength of him, and his every movement was the embodiment of grace. She studied him now, taking unanticipated pleasure in the way he selected his arrow and methodically positioned it, and sent it coursing on its unerring way to the target.
Maddeningly, astonishingly, the sudden unwanted image of herself coupling with Prestimion blazed up in her mind like a fire rising to great conflagration out of the merest spark. His fair-skinned body encompassed her darker one; his mouth was pressed tight against hers; her platinum fingernails fiercely raked his back in the wildest throes of ecstasy. Furiously she banished that image and replaced it with one of Prestimion’s body hanging from a hook on the wall of the Castle, dangling over an abyss.
“Extraordinary,” Korsibar said.
“What is?” said Thismet, taken by surprise.
“His archery, of course!”
“Yes. Yes. The others were good, but Prestimion’s in a class by himself, isn’t he? You get the feeling that he could hit a bird on the wing and then put a second arrow through his first one while the bird is still falling.”
“I think he could do that,” said Korsibar. “I think perhaps I’ve seen him do it.”
“Has he always been as good as this?”
“From the first. That bow he uses: it’s Kamba’s own. Kamba gave it to Prestimion when he was twelve, saying that it was Prestimion’s by right, for he was already the better archer. You could never draw that bow in a million years. I’d be sorely pressed to pull it myself. And the way he makes the arrows go precisely where he wants—”
“Yes,” said Thismet. Prestimion had shot the last of his allotted shafts now, and all of them stood clustered at the center of the target, packed so close together that it was a marvel how he had found room to get the last one in.
“I think there’s sorcery in it,” said Korsibar. “He must have had a spell put on him when he was a boy, that lets him do such magic with the arrows.”
“As I’ve heard it reliably told, Prestimion is no believer in magic.”
“Indeed, I’ve heard it so as well. But what other explanation could there be for skill like his? It must be wizardry at work. It must.”
Prestimion, looking pleased with himself, went from the field. His place at the line was taken by Kent Mekkiturn, a Skandar of the Procurator’s retinue, who wielded a bow at least two yards long from tip to tip as though it were a child’s toy. He held it already drawn with his upper arms while fitting the arrow into its place with his lower ones, and when he released his shaft, it sped into the target with a loud thudding impact that nearly knocked the bull’s-eye from its stand. But the huge Skandar was all strength and little finesse: in no way was he able to match the precision of Prestimion’s shooting.
Korsibar said, “I must tell you, Thismet, of a peculiar thing that Dantirya Sambail said to me while we were watching the wrestling the other day.—Hoy, there, sister, look at this clownish fellow!”
A knight in the costume of Duke Oljebbin’s people had come forward to shoot. Evidently he saw himself as something of a comedian: he sent his first arrow high into the air to descend on a curving trajectory into the target, and shot the second one while standing with his back to the mark. For his third, he stood straddle-legged and discharged the arrow from between his thighs. All three reached the target, though not in any greatly accurate fashion; but it was wonder enough that they reached it at all.
“This is a shameful business,” Thismet said, looking away. “He disgraces one of the finest of arts.—What was that remark of the Procurator’s that you began to mention a moment ago?”
“Ah. That. A strange and ugly thing.”
“Yes, so he is. But what did he say?”
Korsibar smiled grimly. “Your tongue is too wicked, sister.”
“Forgive me. I have little enough to do, you know, except practice my wit.”
The clown was aiming now while lying on his belly. Korsibar shook his head in displeasure. To Thismet he said, leaning close and keeping his voice low, “He told me that he’s heard whisperings to the effect that Prestimion will try to have me put to death after he’s Coronal. To make it seem like an accident, of course. But to remove me one way or another, because I’d be a threat to his reign if I lived.”
Thismet sharply caught her breath. “Whisperings, you say? Whose whisperings?”
“He didn’t say. Very likely the idea exists nowhere but in his own feverish imagination, for Dantirya Sambail’s just the sort that would imagine such bestial atrocities. I told him it was a lunatic notion, preposterous and despicable. And asked him not to speak of such stuff to me again.”
She stared at him gravely. Then after a moment she said, “If I were in your place, I’d take this thing a little less lightly, Korsibar. Whether he’s really heard it whispered about or merely hit upon it all by himself, what the Procurator has told you is sound.”
Korsibar said, startled, “What, you also?”
“Indeed. There’s logic and substance aplenty in it, brother.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“But surely you know that there are a great many people who’d prefer to see you as Coronal and not Prestimion.”
“Yes. I know that. Count Farquanor was speaking of that very thing to me not so long ago, the day we all took wine together in the Banquet Hall just before the games began. Offered to start a conspiracy on my behalf, in fact.”
“My new young handmaid Aliseeva would join that conspiracy, if ever it was launched,” said Thismet, with a little laugh. “And many another. She told me just yesterday that it was a pity you would not be Coronal, for you were ever so much more kingly and handsome than Prestimion. And wished there were some way Prestimion could be set aside in your favor.”
“She said that, did she?”
“She and others besides.”
“Do they all of them think I’m without the least shred of honor and decency?” demanded Korsibar heatedly. And then, in an altogether different tone: “Aliseeva? The red-haired one with the very pale skin?”
“I see that you’ve already noticed her. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose.—What did you tell Count Farquanor that day in the Banquet Hall?”
“What do you think I told him? He was advocating treason!”
“Is it treason to stand by like a fool and be murdered so that Prestimion can be Coronal?”
Korsibar gave her a close, searching look. “You actually do seem to believe that there’s something to take seriously, then, in this insane notion of Dantirya Sambail’s.”
“He’s Prestimion’s kinsman, remember. He could perhaps be privy to Prestimion’s inner mind. And yes, I think it might well be very much in Prestimion’s interest to get you out
of the way once he has the throne. Or even before.”
“Prestimion is a man of decency and honor!”
“Prestimion can counterfeit decency and honor the way he can imitate anything else, I suppose,” said Thismet.
“This is very harsh of you, sister.”
“Perhaps it is, yes.”
Korsibar threw up his hands and looked away.
The clownish archer had gone from the field now, and his place had been taken by one of Prince Serithorn’s sons, a long-limbed young man who set about his shooting with efficiency and skill that came close to matching Prestimion’s own. But he too failed to equal the supreme accuracy of Prestimion’s work, and his final arrow went astonishingly far astray, grazing the edge of the target and skittering off to the ground, which disqualified him entirely for a prize. The young man left with tears glimmering on his cheeks. The ninth contestant appeared, and the tenth and the eleventh, and then one more. Korsibar and Thismet watched them all come and go without speaking, without even looking toward each other.
As the final archer began his work, Korsibar turned once again to Thismet and said abruptly, “Let’s say, purely for the sake of the hypothesis, that it is Prestimion’s plan to have me put out of the way. What would your advice to me be, in that case?”
Instantly Thismet replied, “Put him out of the way first, of course.”
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