Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

Why had he ever wanted to be Coronal? Had he not been happy enough as Prince of Muldemar? Two of his brothers almost certainly dead, his three dear friends swept away in that deluge, the lives lost of thousands of men who had supported his cause, and for what? For what? So that he might sit upon a great ruby-streaked block of black opal instead of some other man, and have people kneel and make inane gesticulations before him, and listen solemnly as he issued decrees?

He was numbed, stunned, by the death and destruction that his determination to wrest the crown from Korsibar had caused. How many had perished for his sake? His overweening ambition had made martyrs of thousands of good people. Majipoor had never been a warlike world; since the pacification of the Shapeshifters seven thousand years before, its people had lived placidly, in happy harmony, and those who were of a warring nature could find release on the jousting-fields and other such rough sports. But now, behold! Because of his determination that he and not the other man should rule, war had come to the world, and men were in their graves who should have had long lives ahead.

Now there was nothing left for him but to march onward into this unknown country in the hope of avoiding the fury of Korsibar’s men, and reach some safe place where he might rest and recover himself, and then he would consider how he meant to spend whatever time might remain to him in the world.

In the days that followed, and for days after that, roots and leaves and little white acrid fruits were the only food Prestimion had. Then at last, on the far side of the chalky hills, the country changed a little, the land becoming pale brown streaked with red: a sign, perhaps, of fertihity. There was a grayish silty little river running here from east to west that was split into three forks. Along the riverbanks the plants had shining green foliage, and some of them carried fat purplish fruits with wrinided skins. Prestimion tried one and it did him no harm, so he ate several others before sleeping, and when he found himself still alive and unpoisoned in the morning, he had some more, and collected others to carry with him in a fold of his jerkin.

This was a harsh untamed land. He had no idea what it was called. Danger lurked everywhere. He stumbled across some loose boughs and nearly fell, and when he caught his balance he looked down and saw himself at the verge of a pit, with glittering red eyes and flashing yellow claws waiting below. Later in the day a long swaybacked beast covered in thick brown scales that looked as hard as rock rushed wildly out of nowhere, swinging its small dull-eyed head from side to side like a club; but it went running past him as though in search of juicier prey. And afterward he saw a comic hopping creature with merry golden eyes and absurd tiny forearms, but from its tail there sprang a spike that squirted poison into the plump gray lizards that it hunted. A day or two later came a swarm of winged insects, as dazzling as colored jewels, that filled the air with a milky spray, and when a bird flew into that deadly mist it let its wings droop and plummeted ground-ward like a stone.

Farther on the terrain changed again. Now it was broken land, cut by gullies and steep canyons. The bones of the world lay exposed here, great dark stripes cutting through the soft reddish rocks of the hillsides. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. There were great trees with thick black trunks and widespreading crowns of yellow leaves.

And there was a village here, in a sheltered place at the floor of a narrow canyon. The people were all Ghayrogs, the gray-scaled reptilian-looking folk with forked, flickering scarlet tongues. There were a few hundred of them, living widely scattered up and down the canyon along a stretch a couple of miles long. This dry country seemed to be what they liked: Ghayrogs often settled in inhospitable parts of Majipoor that reminded them of their home districts on their native world.

They were friendly enough here. They gave Prestimion a place to sleep, and food that was edible enough, though strange, and he was able even to acquire a bow and some arrows to hunt with once he continued along his journey, and a pack to store provisions in when he wandered onward.

Of Coronals and civil wars, these people knew nothing at all. The names “Prestimion” and “Korsibar” and even “Confalume” and “Prankipin” had no significance for them. They lived out here as though on a planet of their own.

He asked them where he was, and they said, in thick hissing accents that he could barely comprehend, “This is the town of Valmambra, where the desert of the same name begins.”

It was like the turning of a key in a door, hearing that name, Valmambra.

Once again Prestimion’s mind went back, far back into what seemed like another life, to that quiet hour spent in his mother’s reading-gallery in Muldemar House. His mother there, and the stoop-shouldered white-haired magus Galbifond. The bowl of slate-colored fluid in which Galbifond had shown him—how?—that all-too-accurate vision of the battle by the shores of the Iyann, the slaughter of his army by Korsibar’s.

But that vision had had a second part, Prestimion remembered now. The battlefield image had faded; the bowl had shown him some grim and bleak landscape, bleaker even than the one he had recently passed. A scattering of isolated jagged hills. Reddish soil, wedge-shaped boulders. The twisted sparse-leaved form of a single szambra-tree writhing before him against the cloudless sky. A tree of the Valmambra Desert and nowhere else, was the szambra-tree. And look! That tiny figure of a man, plodding wearily through the wasteland, every step an effort for him: that short square-shouldered man, golden hair cut short, ragged jerkin, carrying a pack, a bow, a few arrows: himself. Galbifond had let him see it all, there in Muldemar House. Himself, a lonely weary refugee, setting out on foot across the Valmambra toward the wizard-city of Triggoin. Triggoin, where Svor, in a dream, had once been told that Prestimion might learn how to gain the crown that he had lost.

Galbifond had shown all this to him long ago in the depths of that bowl—the battle, the defeat, the trek northward through the desert—and now those very things were coming to pass.

So he must follow his destiny, willy-nilly.

“I have business in the city of Triggoin,” he said to the Ghayrogs of this village that lay at the edge of the desert he knew now he must cross. “Can you tell me how to find the road that leads there?”

The Valmambra was in every way identical to the place Galbifond had shown him in the vision of the bowl—the hills, the boulders, the few twisted trees growing in the reddish soil. But the bowl had been able only to show him the desert: it could not make him feel it. And Prestimion felt it now. It had seemed to him that he had been marching through a desert almost all the time since beginning his northward journey, but he saw now that what he had taken for a desert was a gentle park, a paradise, even, compared with the Valmambra. For the terrain that lay behind him had merely been dry broken country, empty because hardly anybody cared to live there. The Valmambra was true desert indeed, and it was empty because it was virtually uninhabitable.

Triggoin, the Ghayrogs told him, lay in a straight track to the north, on the far side of the desert. He need only guide himself by the stars at night, keep Phaseil to his right and Phasilin to his left and head constantly for the white gleam of Trinatha in the northern sky. After a time he would come to a little village called Jaggereen, another Ghayrog town, which was the only settlement within the Valmambra proper. They would tell him at Jaggereen how to proceed onward to Triggoin.