Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

“Well, my lady. Very well.”

“He has a goodly army assembled by now, does he?”

“I ask your pardon. You’ll have to judge that for yourself. I must regard you as an enemy, lady, and I ought not be telling you details of—”

“I’m not an enemy, Svor.”

He stared and said nothing.

“My brother’s a fool and his advisers are villains. I want no further part of any of them. Why do you think Melithyrrh and I have come traveling halfway across Alhanroel to be here? A nightmare of a trip it was too. Sleeping in the most horrid of hovels, eating the most dreadful slop, fending off the advances of any number of coarse, vulgar—” She paused. “And then to wreck the floater just a few miles from the end of our journey! We were at our wits’ end, Svor, when you came along. —Is there a place nearby, do you think, where I could wash myself a little before you take me before Prestimion? This coating of filth I have on me disgusts me. I haven’t bathed in two days, or perhaps three. Never before in my life have I been as dirty as this.”

“A stream lies just over there,” Svor said, nodding to his left.

“Show us.”

He led them a hundred feet through the thick grass. It was the stream that fed the bog in which they had stranded their floater, its flow was swift and clean.

“Stand over there by your mount,” said Thismet. “Turn your back and keep it turned.”

“I give you my word,” Svor said.

Only once while they were bathing did he steal a look at them, and that when he could no longer force himself not to. A single glance over his shoulder showed him the two of them knee-deep in the stream, incandescently naked, Melithyrrh with her back to him scooping up water in her shirt and pouring it over Thismet, who stood turned to one side. The sight of Melithyrrh’s pale full buttocks and the Lady Thismet’s round flawless breasts seared itself unforgettably into Svor’s mind, and after all these weeks of solitary life it left him weak-kneed and trembling.

“Are you all right, Svor?” asked Thismet when she and Melithyrrh, looking cleaner and much refreshed, returned from the stream’s edge. “You seem sickly all of a sudden.”

“I had an ague last week,” he said. “I am not fully recovered from it, I suppose.” He assisted Thismet into the saddle of the mount, and hopped up dose behind her, his thighs against her haunches, his arm light around her waist. This too stirred him close to madness. He called out to the Lady Melithyrrh not to wander from the place, but to remain by the floater until someone had come for her, and spurred the mount forward.

As they made their way through the thick herds of vongiforin and klimbergeyst, Svor said, after a time,”You are completely estranged from your brother, my lady?”

“It would not be far wrong to put it that way. I left the Castle without notifying him, but Korsibar must know by now where I’ve gone. A day came, suddenly, when I could no longer stand being there among them all. A loathing for the place rose in my throat, and I thought, ‘We were wrong to take the throne from Prestimion. It was a terrible sin against the will of the Divine. I’ll go to him and tell him that, and beg his forgiveness.’ Which is what I mean to do. Do you think he’ll accept it, Svor?”

“Prince Prestimion has only the kindest thoughts for you, my lady,” Svor said mildly. “I have no doubt he’ll be pleased and delighted beyond all measure to hear of your change of heart.”

But he wondered again if this were all some elaborate scheme of Korsibar’s against Prestimion—or, what was more likely, a plot of Dantirya Sambail’s on Korsibar’s behalf. How could it be, though? What possible benefit could accrue to Korsibar from sending his sister and her lady-of-honor across thousands of miles by themselves to Prestimion’s camp? Did she have some wild notion of thrusting that dagger of hers into Prestimion’s heart the moment she came within reach of him? Somehow Svor did not want to believe that of her. Especially when he sat here like this astride the mount, staring at the slender nape of her neck, with his thighs pressed up against her flesh and his arm grasping her middle just below her breasts.

His mind was lost for a moment in a frenzied swirl of desire and impossible yearning. And then he found herself saying softly, into the lovely ear that was only inches from his lips, “My lady, may I tell you something?”

“What is it, Svor?”

“If you are truly of our faction now, lady, then it may be that I can offer you my protection in this unkind place.”

“Your protection, Svor?” Her head was turned away from him; but it seemed to him that she was smiling. “Why, what protection would you be, in this camp of rough soldiers?”

He chose not to take offense. “I mean that you would have my company, that you would not be left alone to be troubled by others who might come upon you, my lady. Do I make myself fully clear?” He was trembling like a lovesick boy, he who had made his way through life always with a clear confident sense of how to attain his destination. “Let me tell you, lady, that ever since I first came to the Castle, I have felt the deepest and most honorable love for—”

“Oh, Svor. Not you too!”

That was not encouraging. But he pushed desperately onward, letting the words spill out unchecked. “Of course I could say nothing of it, especially after the coolness began to develop between your brother and the prince. But at all times, lady, have I looked upon you with unequaled delight—with great love in my heart—with a sincere and eager and all-consuming desire to claim you for my own—”

With surprising gentleness in her tone, Thismet said, “And to how many women before me, Svor, have you professed the same sincere and eager desire?”

“I speak not only of desire but of marriage, my lady. And the answer to your question is, not one, not a single one.”

She was silent for a time that seemed to tick on for ten thousand years. Then she said, “This is a passing odd place to be asking for my hand, my lord duke: crunched together as we are on this mount, riding through the back end of nowhere with wild animals snorting and snuffling all about us, me in rags and you clutching me from behind. Farquanor, at least, made his proposal in more appropriate surroundings.”

“Farquanor?” In horror.

“Oh, don’t worry, Svor. I refused him. Indignantly, as a matter of fact. I refuse you more kindly, for you are a better man than Farquanor by far. But you are not for me. I’m not sure whether there’s a man who is; but at any rate I know you are not the one. Take that without bitterness, Svor, and let’s speak no more of this ever again.”

“So be it,” said Svor, as amazed at his own temerity in having let all this pour forth from him as he was by the softness of her response.

“You might apply yourself to the Lady Melithyrrh,” Thismet said a little while afterward. “Now that she and I are no longer at court, she feels greatly adrift and she might look favorably on your advances. Whether she wants a husband, I can’t say; but whether you truly want a wife is equally doubtful. I think you might do well to approach her, at least.”

“I thank you for the suggestion, my lady.”

“I wish you well with it, Svor.” And then, a bit later, as though she had not already asked it just a short time before: “Will Prince Prestimion believe that my repentance is sincere, do you think?”

Prestimion had not felt such astonishment since the day so long ago when he had come striding into the Court of Thrones to see Korsibar seated on the Coronal’s seat with the starburst crown on his head. Thismet here in the camp? Asking to see him now, alone in his tent?