Silverberg, Robert.

Majipoor - Prestimion.

Lord Prestimion.

Part 1.

The Book of Becoming.

The coronation ceremony, with its ancient ritual incantations and investitures and ringing trumpet-calls, and the climactic donning of the crown and the royal robes, had ended fifty minutes ago. Now came a space of several hours in the festivities before the celebratory coronation feast. 'There was a furious, noisy bustling and hustling throughout the vastness of the great building that from this day onward would be known to the world as Lord Prestimion's Castle, as the thousands of guests and the thousands of servitors made ready for that evening's grand banquet. Only the new Coronal himself stood apart and alone, in a sphere of echoing silence.

After all the strife and turmoil of civil war, the usurpation and the battles and the defeats and the heartbreak, the hour of victory had come.

Prestimion was the anointed Coronal of Majipoor at last, and eager to take up his new tasks.

But-to his great surprise-something troublesome, something profoundly unsettling, had surfaced within him in this glorious hour. The sense of relief and achievement that he had felt at the knowledge that his reign was finally beginning was, he realized, being unexpectedly tempered by a strange core of uneasiness. Why, though? Uneasiness over what? This was his moment of triumph, and he should be rejoicing.

And yet-even so.

A powerful hunger for privacy amid all the frenzy of the day had come over him toward the end of the coronation ceremony, and, when it was over, he had abruptly gone off to sequester himself in the immensity of the Great Hall of Lord Hendighail, where he could be alone. That

huge room was where the celebratory gifts that had been arriving steadily all month, a river of wonderful things flowing toward the Castle without cease from every province of Majipoor, lay piled in glittering array.

Prestimion had only the haziest notion of when Lord Hendighail had lived-seven, eight, nine hundred years before, something like thatand none at all of the man's life and deeds. But it was obvious that Hendighail had believed in doing things on a colossal scale. The Hendighail Hall was one of the biggest rooms in the entire enormous Castle, a mighty chamber ten times as long as it was wide, and lofty in proportion, with a planked ceiling of red ghakka-timber supported by groined vaults of black stone whose intricately interwoven traceries were lost in the dimness far overhead.

The Castle, though, was a city in itself, with busy central districts and old, half-forgotten peripheral ones, and Lord Hendighail had caused his great hall to be built on the northern side of Castle Mount, which was the wrong side, the obscure side. Prestimion, although he had lived at the Mount most of his life, could not remember ever having set foot in the Hendighail Hall before this day. In modern times it had been used mainly as a storage depot, where objects that had not yet found their proper places were kept. Which was how it was being employed today: a warehouse for the tribute coming in from all over the world for the new Coronal.

It was packed now with the most astounding assortment of things, a fantastic display of the color and wonder of Majipoor. The custom was, when a new ruler came to the throne, for all the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor to vie with one another in bestowing gifts of great splendor upon him. But this time-so said the old ones, the ones whose memories went back more than forty years to the last coronation-they had outdone themselves in generosity. What had arrived thus far was three, five, ten times as much as might have been expected. Prestimion felt stunned and dazed by the profusion of it all.

He had hoped that inspecting this great flow of gifts from all the farflung districts of the world might lift his spirits in this unexpectedly cheerless moment. Coronation gifts, after all, were meant to tell a new Coronal that the world welcomed him to the throne.

But to his distress he discovered immediately that they were having the opposite effect. There was something disturbing and unhealthy about so much excess. What he wanted the world to be saying to him was that it was happy to have a bold and vigorous young Coronal taking the place of the old and weary Lord Confalume atop Castle Mount. This extraordinary torrent of costly presents was altogether too great a display of gratitude, though. It was extreme; it was disproportionate; it indicated that the world was undergoing a kind of wild frenzy of delight over his accession, altogether out of keeping with the actual fact of the event.

That worldwide overreaction mystified him. Surely they had not been that eager for Lord Confalume to go. They had loved Lord Confalume, who had been a great Coronal in his day, although everyone knew that Confalume's day now was over and it was time for someone new and more dynamic to occupy the seat of kingly power, and that Prestimion was the right man. Even'so, this outpouring of gifts upon the transfer of authority seemed almost as much an expression of relief as one of joy.

Relief over what? Prestimion wondered. What had triggered such a superfluity of jubilation, verging on worldwide hysteria?

A fierce civil war had lately come to a happy outcome. Were they rejoicing over that, perhaps?

No. No.

The citizens of Majipoor could not possibly know anything about the sequence of strange events-the conspiracy and the usurpation and the terrible war that followed it-that had brought Lord Prestimion by such a roundabout route to his throne. All of that had been obliterated from the world's memory by Prestimion's own command. So far as Majipoor's billions of people were aware, the civil war had never happened . The brief illegitimate reign of the self-styled Coronal Lord Korsibar had vanished from memory as though it had never been. As the world understood things, Lord Confalume, upon the death of the old Pontifex Prankipin, had succeeded to Prankipin's title, whereupon Prestimion had serenely and uneventfully been elevated to the Coronal's throne, which Confalume had held for so long. So, then, why this furore? Why?

Along all four sides of the huge room the bewildering overabundance of gifts rose high, most of them still in their packing-cases, mountains of stacked treasure climbing toward the distant roof-timbers.

Room after room of this rarely used northern wing of the Castle was filled with crates from far-off districts whose names meant little or nothIng to Prestimion. Some of them were familiar to him only as notations on the map, others not known to him at all. New loads of cargo were arriving even now. The chamberlains of the Castle were

at their wits'

end to deal with it all.

And what lay before him here was only a fraction of what had come in. There were the live gifts, too. 'The people of the provinces had sent an extraordinary assortment of animals, a whole zoo's worth of them and then some, the most bizarre and fantastic beasts to be found on Majipoor. The Divine be thanked, they were being kept somewhere else. And strange plants as well, for the Coronal's garden. Prestimion had seen some of those yesterday: some huge trees with foliage like swords of gleaming silver, and grotesque succulent things with twisted spiky leaves, and a couple of sinister carnivorous mouthplants from Zimroel, clanking their central jaws to show how horrendously eager they were to be fed, and a tub of dark porphyry filled with translucent gambeliavos from Stoienzar's northern coast, that looked as if they were made of spun glass and gave off soft tinkling sighs when you passed your hand over them-and much more besides, botanical splendors beyond enumeration. All those too were elsewhere.

The sheer volume of all this, the great size of the offering, was overwhelming . His mind could not take it all in.

To Prestimion it seemed as if this great piled-up mass of objects was Majipoor itself in all its size and complexity: as if the entire massive world, largest planet in the galaxy, had somehow forced its way into this one room today. Standing in the midst of his mounds of gifts, he felt dwarfed by the lavishness of the display, the dazzling extravagant prodigality of it. He knew that he should be pleased; but the only emotion he could manage, surrounded by so much tangible evidence of his new grandeur, was a kind of numbed dismay. That unexpected and baffling sense of hollowness that had been mounting in him throughout the lengthy formalities of the rite that had made him Coronal Lord of Majipoor, leaving him mysteriously saddened and somber in what should have been his hour of triumph, now threatened to engulf his entire soul.

As though in a dream Prestimion wandered around the hall, randomly examining some of the packages that his staff had already opened.

Here was a shimmering crystal pillow, within which could be seen a richly detailed rural landscape, green carpets of moss, trees with bright yellow foliage, the purple roof-tiles of some pretty town unknown to him, everything as vivid and real as though the place portrayed were actually contained within the stone. A scroll attached to it declared it to be the gift of the village of Glau, in the province of Thelk Samminon, in western Zimroel. With it came a scarlet coverlet of richly woven silken brocade, fashioned, so the scroll said, of the fine fleece of the local water-worms.

Here was a casket brimming with rare gems of many colors, which gave off a pulsating glow in gold and bronze and purple and crimson like the finest of sunsets. Here was a glossy cloak of cobalt-blue feathers-the feathers of the famous fire-beetles of Gamarkaim,

said the accompanying note, giant insects that looked like birds and were invulnerable to the touch of flame. The wearer of the cloak would be as well.

And here, fifty sticks of the precious red charcoal of Hyanng, which when kindled had the ability to drive any disease from the body of the Coronal.

Here, an exquisite set of small figurines lovingly carved from some shining translucent green stone. They depicted, so their label informed him, the typical wildlife of the district of Karpash: a dozen or more images of unfamiliar and extraordinary beasts, portrayed down to the tiniest details of fur and horns and claws. They began to move about, snorting and scampering and chasing one another around the box that held them, as soon as Prestimion's breath had warmed them to life.

And heref Prestimion heard the great door of the hall creaking open behind him. Someone entering. He would not be allowed to be alone even here.

A discreet cough; the sound of approaching footsteps. He peered into the shadows at the far end of the room.

A slender, lanky figure, drawing near.

"Ah. There you are, Prestimion. Akbalik told me you were in here.

Hiding from all the fuss, are you?"

The elegant, long-legged Septach Melayn, second cousin to the Duke of Tidias, it was: a peerless swordsman and fastidious dandy, and Prestimion's lifelong friend. He still wore his finery of the coronation ceremony-a saffron-hued tunic embroidered in golden chasings of flowers and leaves, and gold-laced buskins tightly wound. Septach Melayn's hair, golden as well and tumbling to his shoulders in elaborately arranged ringlets, was bedecked with three gleaming emerald clasps. His short, sharply pointed yellow-red beard was newly trimmed.

He came to a halt some ten feet from Prestimion and stood with arms akimbo, looking around in wonder at the multitude of gifts.

'Well," he said, finally, in obvious awe. "So you're Coronal at last, Prestimion, after all the fuss and fury. And here's a great pile of treasure to prove it, eh?"

"Coronal at last, yes," said Prestimion in a sepulchral tone.

Septach Melayn's brow furrowed in puzzlement. "How dour you sound! You are king of the world, and yet you don't sound particularly pleased about it, do you, my lord? After what we've been through to put you here!"

"Pleased? Pleased?" Prestimion managed a half-chuckle. "Where's the pleasure in it, Septach Melayn? Tell me that, will you?" He felt a sudden strange throbbing behind his forehead. Something was stirring with him, he knew, something dark and furious and inimical that he had never known was in him at all. And then, pouring out of him uncontrollably , came a most surprising cascade of singularly intense bitterness.

"King of the world, you say? What does that mean? I'll tell you, Septach Melayn. Years and years of hard work face me now, until I'm as dried out as an old piece of leather, and then, whenever old Confalume finally dies, I go to live in the dark dismal Labyrinth, never to see the light of day again. I ask you: What pleasure? Where?"

Septach Melayn gaped at him in amazement. For an instant he seemed unable to speak. This was a Prestimion he had never seen before.

At length he managed to say, "Ah, what a dark mood is this for your coronation day, my lord!"

Prestimion was astounded himself by that eruption of fury and pain.

This is very wrong, he thought, abashed. I am speaking madness. I must do something to change the tone of this conversation to something lighter. He wrenched himself into some semblance of his usual self and said, in an altogether different manner, consciously irreverent, "Don't call me 'my lord,' Septach Melayn. Not in private, anyway. It sounds so stiff and formal. And obsequious."

"But you are my lord. I fought hard to make you so, and have the scars to prove it."

"I'm still Prestimion to you, all the same."

"Yes. Prestimion. Very well. Prestimion. Prestimion.

As you wish, my lord."

"In the name of the Divine, Septach Melayn-!" cried Prestimion, with an exasperated grin at that last playful jab. But what else could he expect from Septach Melayn, if not frivolity and teasing?

Septach Melayn grinned as well. Both of them now were working hard to pretend that Prestimion's startling outburst had never happened . Extending a pointing hand toward the Coronal, a lazy, casual gesture, he said, "What is that thing you're holding, Prestimion?"

"This? Why, it's-it's-" Prestimion consulted the scroll of tawny leather that had come with it. "A wand made of gameliparn horn, they say. It will change color from this golden hue to a purplish-black whenever waved over food containing poison."

"You believe that, do you?"

"The citizens of Bailemoona do, at any rate. And here-here, Septach Melayn, this is said to be a mantle woven from the belly-fur of the icekuprei , that lives in the snowy Gonghar peaks."

"Ibe ice-kuprei is extinct, I think, my lord."

"A pity, if it is," said Prestimion, idly fondling the thick smooth fabric.

"The fur is very soft to the touch. -In here," he went on, tapping a square bale bound in ornate seals, "here we have

an offering from someplace in the south, strips of the highly fragrant bark of the very rare quinoncha tree. And this handsome cup is carved from the jade of Vyrongimond, which is so hard that it takes half a lifetime to polish a piece the size of your fist. And this-" Prestimion struggled with a halfopened crate out of which some shimmering marvel of silver and carnelian was protruding. It was as though by rummaging so frantically amongst these crates he might somehow pull himself out of the edgy, half. despondent mood that had driven him to this room in the first place.

But he could not deceive Septach Melayn. Nor could Septach Melayn maintain his studied indifference to Prestimion's earlier show of anguish any longer.

"Prestimion?"

T9.

"Yes The swordsman came a step or two nearer. He towered over Prestimion, for the Coronal was a compact man, strong-shouldered but short in the leg, and Septach Melayn was so slim and lengthy of limb that he seemed almost frail, though in fact he was not.

Quietly he said, "You need not show me every one, my lord."

"I thought you were interested."

"I am, up to a point. But only up to a point." In a tone that was quieter still, Septach Melayn said, "Prestimion, just why have you gone slinking away by yourself to this room just now? Surely not to gloat over your gifts. That's never been your nature, to covet and fondle mere objects."

"They are very fine and curious objects," said Prestimion staunchly.

"No doubt they are. But you should be dressing for tonight's feast now, not prowling around by yourself in this storehouse of strangenesses. And your peculiar words of a few minutes past-that cry of pain, that bitter lament I tried to ignore it as some odd aberration of the moment but it keeps echoing in my mind. What did all that mean? Were you sincere, crying out against the burden of the crown? I never thought to hear such things from your lips. You're Coronal now, Prestimion! The summit of any man's ambition. You will rule this world in glory This should be the most splendid day of your life."

"It should be, yes."

"And yet-you withdraw to this dismal hall, you brood in solitude, you distract yourself with these silly pretty trinkets in your own great moment of attainment, you cry out against your own kingship as though it's a curse someone has laid upon you- "A passing mood."

"Then let it pass, Prestimion. Let it pass! This is a day of celebration!

It's not two hours since you stood before the ConfalumeMrone and put the starburst crown on your forehead, and now-now-if you could see your own face, now, my lord-that look of gloom, that bleak and tragic stare-"

Prestimion offered Septach Melayn an exaggerated comic smile, all flashing teeth and bulging eyes.

"Well? Is this better?"

"Hardly. I am not in any way fooled, Prestimion. What can possibly distress you this way, on this day of days?" And, when Prestimion made no response: "Perhaps I know."

"How could you not?" And then, without giving Septach Melayn a chance to answer: "I've been thinking of the war, Septach Melayn. The war.

Septach Melayn seemed caught by surprise for an instant. But he made a quick recovery.

"Ah. 'The war, yes. The war, of course, Prestimion. It marks us all.

But the war's over. And forgotten. No one in the world remembers the war but you and Gialaurys and I. All those who are gathered here at the Castle today for your coronation rites: they have no memory whatever of that other coronation that took place in these halls not so long ago."

'We remember, though. We three. The war will stay with us forever.

The waste, the needlessness. The destruction. The deaths. So many of them. Svor. Kanteverel. My brother Taradath. EarlKamba of Mazadone, my master in the art of the bow. Iram, Mandrykarn, Sibellor. And hundreds more, thousands, even." He closed his eyes a moment, and turned his head away. I regret them all, those deaths. Even the death of Korsibar, that poor deluded fool."

"You have left one name unspoken, and not a trivial one," said Septach Melayn; and delicately he provided it, as if to lance an inflamed and swollen wound. "I mean that of his sister the Lady Thismet."

,Thismet, yes."

The name that could not be avoided, hard as Prestimion had tried.

He could hardly bear to speak of her; but she was never absent long from his mind.

"I know your pain," said Septach Melayn softly. "I understand. Time will heal you, Prestimion."

"Will it? Can it?"