Roghoiz was gigantic. Whole nations of some smaller world could have been submerged in it, with margin to spare. Every stream of the southwestern slope of Castle Mount drained into the Glayge, which carried all that immeasurable volume of water tumbling down the long steep gradient of the foothill country for thousands of miles, descending through ledge after ledge, terrace after terrace, until at last it came to a place where the land widened into a wide plain. In the center of that plain lay a shallow basin great enough for the river to deliver its burden into it; and that enormous basin was the bed of Lake Roghoiz.
Along the margins of this region of the lake were broad banks of bright orange mud. Here the famous stilt-houses of Lake Roghoiz abounded, forming a string of small fishing villages, hundreds of them—thousands perhaps—that were home to a lakeside population reaching up into the millions.
In part these stilt-houses of the Roghoiz shore were natural structures, something like the even more renowned tree-houses of Treymone on Alhanroel’s western coast. The Treymone people actually lived within their trees, though, forming the rooms they occupied out of pliant branches joined together, but those of Roghoiz merely used theirs as platforms upon which to build.
For in the fertile orange silt of the lake’s southern shore—and only in that place, in all of Majipoor—there thrived the dyumbataro-tree, whose branches and boughs sprouted not from a single central trunk but at the crown of an immense mass of close-packed pink aerial roots that rose like stilts out of the shoreline ooze. Up came these bare woody roots, scores of them for each tree, to heights of fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty feet above the ground; and there, whenever the tree chose to begin its crown, the root-mass widened out into a great wild profusion of ropy vinelike shoots covered with glossy saucer-sized leaves and flowering stalks that sent scarlet spears thrusting outward at acute angles.
The people of the lakeshore had discovered long ago that if a young dyumbataro-tree’s upward growth were interrupted by topping at the crown-point—if it were cut there, just as the first growth of leaf-bearing shoots was beginning to appear—it would continue to grow laterally at that point, ultimately creating a flat woody platform eighteen or twenty feet across, the ideal foundation for a house. These they would build from translucent sheets of a thin glossy mineral that was peeled from the sides of cliffs a few miles to the east: they bent this stuff into domes, which they fastened down with wooden hoops and pegs atop the platforms. Inside these they made their dwellings. They were, most of them, crude simple hovels of no more than three or four rooms; but at sunset, when streams of golden-bronze rays struck these domed buildings along their western faces, an effect of extraordinary beauty was created by the blood-red glint of reflected light that rebounded from them.
Prestimion and his companions took lodgings in a modest lakeside hostelry for traveling merchants in the first of these stilt-villages to which they came, a place called Daumry Thike, where they were told they could make their arrangements for a change of transport. It seemed wisest not to advertise his identity, but simply to remain in and about the hostelry in the anonymous guise of a group of young Castle aristocrats heading homeward to the Mount after a visit to the Labyrinth.
The village was situated no more than a hundred yards from the edge of the lake. Here, the silty ground beneath the buildings was perpetually moist. When the storms of the rainy season arrived—they came in autumn in this region—the lake sometimes expanded well beyond its normal bounds, if the year happened to be an unusually wet one, so that its waters came right up into the village, lapping at the pink stilts and making it necessary to get from one place to another in Daumry Thike by canoe. And in a very wet year, of the sort that might come only once in many centuries, the water might reach almost to the lower stories of the houses: so said the chambermaid who brought them their simple meals of grilled lake-fish and tart young wine.
There had been a flood of that sort in the days of Setiphon and Lord Stanidar, she told them, and another during the time of Dushtar and Lord Vaisha. And in the reign of the Coronal Lord Mavestoi there had been such a deluge that the village had been submerged clear to its rooftops for three days, just when the Coronal himself was here while making his grand processional.
Nilgir Sumanand, who was Prestimion’s aide-de-camp, was about to go into the village to set about the task of chartering a riverboat. Since even the chambermaids of this place seemed so well versed in ancient history, Prestimion asked him to try to learn whether these people were equally familiar with current events. When he returned at nightfall, Nilgir Sumanand brought word that the citizens of Daumry Thike did indeed seem to be aware of the recent change of regime. Portraits of the late Pontifex Prankipin were on display outside a goodly number of houses, with the yellow streamers of mourning affixed to them.
“And the new Coronal? What about him?”
“They know that Korsibar has taken the throne. I saw no portraits of him out, though.”
“No, of course not,” said Prestimion. “Where would they have come from, so soon? But you heard his name mentioned often, did you?”
“Yes.” Nilgir Sumanand looked away, abashed. He was a full-bearded gray-haired man of medium height, who had been in the service of Prestimion’s father before him in Muldemar. “They were speaking of him, some of them. Not all, but some. A good many, I would say.”
“And were they calling him Lord Korsibar when they spoke of him?”
“Yes,” Nilgir Sumanand said in a husky whisper, wincing as though Prestimion had just uttered some terrible gross obscenity. “Yes, that is what they called him.”
“And did they express surprise, would you say, that Korsibar had become Coronal and not someone else? Or distress, or any sort of dismay at all?”
Nilgir Sumanand was slow to reply.
“No,” he said after an awkward span of time had passed. He moistened his lips. “In truth I heard no surprise expressed, sir. There is a new Coronal, and he is Prince Korsibar: and they had no comments to make concerning what has happened, beyond that simple fact.”
“Even though Korsibar’s the son of the former Coronal?”
“I heard no surprise over that fact, sir,” said Nilgir Sumanand again, almost too softly to be heard, and still not looking directly at Prestimion as he spoke.
Septach Melayn said, “There’s little to wonder at in this. These are fishermen here, not constitutional lawyers. What do they know of the customs of transition? Or care, so long as the fish continue to take their bait?”
“They know that it isn’t a usual thing for a Coronal’s son to become Coronal after him,” said Gialaurys, biting angrily at his own words.
“They also know,” said Svor, “if they know anything much at all about the lordlings of the Castle, that Prince Korsibar cuts a grand and illustrious figure, and looks very much the way they imagine a king ought to look, holding himself well and speaking in a clear kingly voice that has great power and richness, and what better reason can there be for making him Coronal, in the eyes of humble people like these? And they know also that if Lord Confalume chose his own son to be his successor, why, it must have been with the welfare of the populace in mind, for Lord Confalume is beloved everywhere for his wisdom and benevolence.”
“No more of this talk, if you will,” said Prestimion, for he felt a dark cloud of gloom coming over him, and he loathed that. “Perhaps things will be different as we get nearer to the Mount.”
* * *
It would be another two days yet before a vessel of the proper sort to take them onward would pass this way. Prestimion, Svor, Gialaurys, and Septach Melayn waited out their time in Daumry Thike, spending the long hours peering down from the veranda of their stilt-house at the fat-legged blue-eyed crabs that went crawling across the orange mud, and wagering on which one would be the first to reach a line that they had drawn across their path. In due course the riverboat that Nilgir Sumanand had chartered for them arrived, anchoring a few hundred yards off shore where
the water was deep enough. A small creaking ferry carried Prestimion and his companions out to it.
The riverboat was a far sleeker craft than the barge that had brought them up the Glayge from the Labyrinth: narrow-beamed and low-sided and sharply tapered fore and aft, with a triple mast whose brightly painted spars were festooned with garish witch-signs. It was smaller and rather less imposingly appointed than the vessels in which princes of Castle Mount normally made journeys between the Mount and the Labyrinth, but it would do. Termagant was the riverboat’s name, emblazoned in flaming red letters of jagged baroque style against the lemon-hued wall of its hull, and its captain was Dimithair Vort, a lean, hard-bodied plain-faced woman of Ambleborn, with muscles like a stevedore’s and a thick uncouth mop of kinky black hair, to the tips of which she had attached a jingling multitude of small amulets and charms.
“Prestimion,” she said, glancing at the names on the passenger manifest. “Which one of you’s Prestimion?”
“I am.”
“Prestimion of Muldemar?”
“The same.”
“Brother of mine once took you hunting gharvoles, out in the Thazgarth country back of Mount Baskolo. You and some other great important lords. He’s a guide there, my brother, name of Vervis Aktin.” She gave Prestimion a coolly appraising look. “I thought you’d be a much taller man.”
“I thought I would be too. The Divine had other plans for me.”
“My brother said you were the best man with a bow he’d ever seen. Himself excepted, of course. He’s the finest archer in the world. Vervis Aktin: do you remember him?”
“Very clearly,” said Prestimion. It had been seven years before; Korsibar, with whom he had been more friendly then, had invited Prestimion to join him on a jaunt into the Thazgarth hunting preserve, a dense forest of northeastern Alhanroel, fifteen hundred miles across, where the deadliest of predators were left to roam freely. Septach Melayn had been with them also, and the young and overly wild Earl Belzyn of Bibiroon, who would be killed the following year in a climbing accident.
Vervis Aktin, Prestimion recalled now, had hair of much the same frizzled sort as his sister’s, and the same wiry but powerful build, and the same blunt indifference to aristocratic prestige. By the campfire at night he had boasted freely to them of his amatory exploits, his casual seduction of any number of highborn huntresses during the course of expeditions in the preserve; Korsibar had had to silence him before he named actual names. Prestimion remembered him as a tireless guide and, yes, a superb bowman, though not perhaps as supremely gifted as Dimithair Vort claimed.
She led them to their quarters, small simple cabins just below the bridge, where they would make their homes for many days to come. Prestimion would share his with Gialaurys, Duke Svor with Septach Melayn.
“What is your brother doing now?” Prestimion asked her as she lingered in the doorway, idly watching them.
“Still a guide in Thazgarth. Lost a leg when he got between a mother gharvole and her cub, but that hasn’t slowed him down. He was very impressed by you, you know. Not just on account of what you did with a bow. Said that you’d be Coronal some day.”
“Perhaps I will,” said Prestimion.
“Of course, we’re not ready for another one so soon, are we? This new Lord Korsibar’s only just settling in. You know him, I suppose?”
“Quite well. He was with your brother and me that time in Thazgarth.”
“Was he, now? Old Confalume’s son, he is, so I hear. That right? Well, why not, keep it in the family! Divine knows, I’d do the same. You great lords understand how to look out for yourselves.” She grinned, showing fierce, sharp-pointed teeth. “My brother always used to tell me—”
But Septach Melayn intervened then, for he disliked such a degree of familiarity as this woman was assuming with Prestimion and the conversation had long since ceased to amuse him. He sent Dimithair Vort on her way and the travelers set about installing themselves in their cabins.
After a time there came the sound of chanting outside. Prestimion peered out and saw half a dozen members of the crew huddled on deck, the captain and some others, passing small stones from hand to hand according to some complex predetermined pattern as they sang. He had seen this done before. It was some sort of ceremony intended to ensure the safety of the voyage, a routine bit of conjuring. The stones were sacred ones, blessed by some shaman whose power the captain trusted.
Prestimion watched the sailors almost tenderly. His rational self was repelled as ever by this further show of superstition, this naive trust in dead stones, but even so he was awed by the purity and intensity of the faith implied in it, a faith in benevolent watchful spirits who could be persuaded to look after one. They were capable of belief in things unseen; he was not; the difference in outlook between him and them was like a wall. Prestimion found himself yearning to share that faith of theirs, which he had never been able even for a moment to feel: and was conscious all the more of the lack, now that the great prize had been snatched from him, and no way visible in the world of reason and natural phenomena by which he could reclaim it. Spirits offered consolation at a time when worldly goals eluded one’s grasp. But only if you thought that the spirits existed.
Svor appeared beside him. Prestimion pointed toward the ceremony in progress and touched a finger to his lips. Svor nodded.
The chanting came to an end and the crewmen silently dispersed.
“How real it is to them!” said Prestimion. “How seriously they take the power of those stones!”
“And with good reason,” said Svor. “Believe or disbelieve as you choose, I tell you, Prestimion, there are mighty forces to be commanded, if only one knows how. ‘I can displace the sky,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘elevate the lands, melt mountains, freeze fountains. I can raise ghosts and bring the gods down to walk among us. I can extinguish the stars and illuminate the bottomless pit.’ ”
“Can you, now?” Prestimion said, looking at him strangely. “I had no idea you were such a powerful sorcerer, my lord Svor.”
“Ah,” said Svor, “I’m merely quoting poetry. Very famous poetry, actually.”
“Of course.” It came immediately to his mind, now that Svor had given him the hint. “Furvain, isn’t it? Yes, of course, Furvain. I should have realized.”
“The Book of Changes, fifth canto, when the Metamorph priestess appears before Lord Stiamot.”
“Yes,” Prestimion said, abashed. “Of course.” What child had not read that grand epic tale, thousands of years old, that related in such stirring verse the heroic battles of Majipoor’s dawn? But extinguishing the stars and illuminating the bottomless pit was the stuff of fable. He had never mistaken Furvain’s great poem for historical fact. “I thought you were claiming those powers for yourself,” he said, laughing. “Ah, Svor, Svor, if only someone would witch things back the way they should have been for me, with Korsibar spending his days out hunting in the wilderness and the government safely in my hand! But who can do that for me?”
“Not I,” said Svor. “I would if I could.”
4
On the ninth day of Lord Korsibar’s journey northward up the Glayge from the Labyrinth, a blue-white star appeared high overhead, one that no one had ever seen before, burning diamond-bright in the forehead of the sky, a great blazing gem that dazzled the eye like a second sun.
Mandrykarn was the first to spy it, half an hour after the evening meal. He was standing by himself on the foredeck of the lead vessel of the nine-ship flotilla, the Lord Vildivar. That was the Coronal’s own Lower Glayge riverboat, the most splendid of flat-bottomed barges, which had carried the former Lord Confalume to the Labyrinth in the spring and now was carrying the new Lord Korsibar toward the Castle in midsummer. Suddenly, in the mildness of the night, as Mandrykarn stood drinking cool gray wine while the darkness gathered and deepened and he gazed idly outward in a tranquil mood over the flat monotonous valley, he felt a chill about his head and shoulders. He looked up, and there was the sta
r brilliantly ablaze in a place where no star had been a moment earlier.
Letting out a whoop of surprise and dismay, he brought his hand up so hastily toward the rohilla pinned to the breast of his tunic that he spilled his wine over himself.
A new star? What could that mean, if not impending doom and calamity? For surely that star must be the sign of powerful and dangerous forces that were on the verge of breaking through the walls of the cosmos, and shortly to descend upon the world.
Stroking the amulet briskly, Mandrykarn murmured a spell against evil that he had learned only the day before from Sanibak-Thastimoon, all the while staring at the strange new star and experiencing such an access of uncontrollable fear and trembling that after a time he felt acrid shame at his own cowardice.
Count Farquanor materialized from somewhere to stand at his elbow. “Are you taken ill, Mandrykarn?” the serpentine little man asked, with a wicked touch of slyness in his tone. “I heard you cry out. And here you are all pale and shaken.”
Mandrykarn said, fighting back that shameful tremor of his body and mastering with furious effort a quaver that had stolen into his voice, “Look above you, Farquanor. What do you see?”
“The sky. Stars. A flock of thimarnas flying homeward very late to their nests.”
“You are no astronomer, Farquanor. What is that blue-white star just to the west of the polar meridian?”
“Why, Trinatha, I suppose,” said Farquanor. “Or perhaps Phaseil. One or the other, at any rate.”
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