Robert Silverberg - The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn

In the days when Simmilgord was a wiry little boy growing up in the Vale of Gloyn he was fond of going out by himself into the broad savanna where the red gattaga-grass grew. Bare little stony hillocks rose up there like miniature mountains, eighty or ninety feet high. Clambering to the top of this one or that, he would shade his eyes against the golden-green sunlight and look far outward across that wide sea of thick copper-colored stalks. It amused him to pretend that from his lofty perch he could see the entire continent of Alhanroel from coast to coast, the great city of Alaisor in the distant west, the unthinkable height of Castle Mount rising like a colossal wall in the other direction, and, somewhere beyond that, the almost unknown eastern lands stretching on and on to the far shore of the Great Sea, marvel after marvel, miracle after miracle, and when he was up there he felt it would be no difficult thing to reach out and embrace the whole world in all its wonder.

Of course no one could actually see as far as that, or anything like it. Simply to think about such a distance made one’s head spin. Alhanroel was too big to grasp, a giant continent that one could spend an entire lifetime exploring without ever fully coming to terms with the immensity of it, and Alhanroel was just one of the three continents of which the vast world of Majipoor was comprised. Beyond its shores lay the other two continents of Zimroel and Suvrael, nearly as large, and on the far side of Zimroel began the almost mythical Great Sea that no one had ever been able to cross. Simmilgord knew all that. He was a good student; he had paid attention to his geography lessons and his history books. But still it was a glorious thing to go scrambling up to the summit of some jagged little rockpile and stare out beyond the endless mats of coppery-hued gattaga, beyond the grazing herds of stupid flat-faced klimbergeysts and the snuffling pig-like vongiforin that rooted about among them digging for tasty seeds, beyond the grove of spiky gray skipje-trees and the towering gambalangas that grazed on their tender topmost leaves, and imagine that he could take in all of Alhanroel in a single swiveling glance, the bustling seaports in the west and the lush tropical forests to the south and the great Mount with its Fifty Cities to the east, and the Castle at its summit from which the Coronal Lord Henghilain ruled the world in high majesty and splendor. He wanted to swallow it all at a single gulp, woodlands and jungles, deserts and plains, rivers and seas. Mine! Mine! This whole extraordinary world—mine! For Simmilgord there was a kind of wild soaring music in that thought: the vast symphony that was Majipoor.

Even at the age of ten Simmilgord understood that he was never going to see any of those places. The world was too huge, and he was too insignificant, nothing but a farmer’s son whose probable destiny it was to spend his life right here in Gloyn, growing lusavender and hingamort and never getting any farther from home than one of the market towns of west-central Alhanroel, Kessilroge, maybe, or Gannamunda, or at best Marakeeba, somewhere off to the east. What a dreary prospect! Then and there, clinging to the top of that barren little mass of granite, he vowed to transcend that vision of an empty future, to make something out of his life, to rise up out of the Vale of Gloyn and make a mark in the world that would cause others to take note of him. He would become an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, a world traveler, the confidante of dukes and princes, perhaps even a figure of some prominence at the Coronal’s court. Somehow—somehow—

That romantic dream stayed with him as he grew into adolescence, though he scaled back his ambitions somewhat. He came to understand that he was better fitted by temperament to be a scholar of some sort than any kind of swashbuckling hero; but even that was far better than staying here in Gloyn and, like his father and all who had come before him for the past twenty generations, live from harvest to harvest, consuming his life in the unending cycle of planting and growing and gathering and marketing.

In Upper School he found himself drawn to the study of history. That was how he would encompass the magnificence that was Majipoor, by taking all its long past within himself, mastering its annals and archives, delving into the accounts of the first settlers to come here from Old Earth, the initial wonderstruck discoveries of strange beasts and natural wonders, the early encounters with the aboriginal Shapeshifters, the founding of the cities, the creation of its governmental structure, the reigns of the first Pontifexes and Coronals, the gradual spreading out from Alhanroel to the outer continents, the conquest of mighty Castle Mount, and all the rest. The romance of the world’s long history set his soul ablaze. What fascinated him in particular was that someone, one man, the Pontifex Dvorn, had been able to make a unified and cohesive realm out of all this immensity.

What Dvorn had accomplished held a special fascination for him. It was Simmilgord’s great hope to plunge into all of that and make out of Majipoor’s unthinkable complexity a single coherent narrative, just as Dvorn, long ago, had made one world out of hundreds of independent city-states. He dreamed of earning admission to the Hall of Records within the enormous library Lord Stiamot had founded atop the Mount that coiled around the Castle’s heart from side to side like a giant serpent, or of prowling through the dusty documents stored in the nearly as capacious archive in the depths of the Labyrinth, and bringing forth out of all that chaotic data a chronicle of Majipoor’s history that would supersede anything that had ever been written.

Simmilgord was surprised to find his father encouraging him in this dream. He had not expected that. But there were other sons to work the farm, and Simmilgord had never shown much enthusiasm for the farm chores, anyway; plainly he was meant for other things. It seemed best for him to go to the famous University at Sisivondal and work to achieve his goal. And so he did. When he was sixteen he set out down the Great Western Highway, making the long eastward trek through Hunzimar and Gannamunda and Kessilroge and Skeil into the dusty plains of central Alhanroel, coming finally to Sisivondal, the tirelessly busy mercantile center where all the main shipping routes of Alhanroel crossed.

What a drab place it was! Miles and miles of faceless flat-roofed warehouses, of long monotonous boulevards decorated only with the sort of ugly black-leaved plants, squat and tough and spiky,that could withstand the long months of rainless days and hot winds under which the city suffered, the dreariest city imaginable on a world where most places took pride in the beauty and boldness of their architecture. Day and night caravans thundered down its grim streets, bringing or taking every sort of merchandise the huge planet produced. In the midst of the constant hubbub was the formidable wall surrounding the great University—Sisivondal’s one center of high culture, second only to the revered University of Arkilon in scholarly repute—erected by the proud and wealthy merchants of the city to mark their own worldly success. But even the University was a somber thing, one bleak red-brick pile after another, all of its buildings done in a style more appropriate to a prison than to a temple of learning. Simmilgord, who had seen nothing of the world but the pleasant pastoral groves of the Vale of Gloyn, but who knew from his books of such dazzling and amazingly beautiful far-off places as glorious Stee, the grandest of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, and glistening white Ni-moya, Zimroel’s big river-port, and spectacular Stoien of the crystal pavilions on the tropical southern coast, was stunned by the eye-aching awfulness of it all.