Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

You will shake the world. Indeed.

Impatiently, Korsibar gestured to Sanibak-Thastimoon to stand aside, and went out into the hall.

The immense outer door of the Coronal’s suite, all agleam with dazzling golden inlays of the starburst emblem and with his father’s LCC monogram—which would have to be changed soon enough to Prestimion’s LPC—confronted him. Three prodigious swaggering Skandars in the green and gold uniform of the Coronal’s royal guard stood before it.

Korsibar craned his neck to look up at the shaggy four-armed beings, nearly half again as tall even as he, and said, “The Coronal has asked me to come to him.”

At the Castle, sometimes, the guardians of the Coronal’s office would make him wait like any young knight-initiate, Coronal’s son though he might be, because his lordship was busy with his ministers of state, or his intimate counsellors, or perhaps some visiting regional administrators. The son of the Coronal had no formal rank of his own, and those others took precedence over him. But today the guards moved aside instantly and let him go in.

Lord Confalume was at his desk, a broad polished platform of glossy crimson simbajinder-wood rising from a thick podium of black gelimaund. The only illumination was the bright orange glow emanating from a trio of thick spiral-shafted candles of black wax set in heavy iron sconces, and the air was sweet and steamy with the rank piercing fragrance of burning incense, rising in two gray-blue coils of smoke from golden thuribles on either side of the Coronal’s seat.

He was involved in a conjuration of some sort. Charts and works of reference covered his desk, and interspersed among them were all manner of instruments and devices having to do with the geomantic arts. Korsibar, who kept people like Sanibak-Thastimoon on hand to deal with such matters for him, had no idea what the purpose of most of those objects might be, though even he recognized the whisk-broomlike ammatepala that was used to sprinkle the water of perception across one’s forehead, and the shining coils and posts of an armillary sphere, and the triangular stone vessel known as a veralistia, in which one burned the aromatic powders that enhanced one’s insight into the future.

Korsibar waited patiently while his father, not looking up, carried out what seemed to be the conclusion of some lengthy and elaborate tabulation of numbers. And said quietly, when Lord Confalume appeared to be finished, “You wanted to see me, Father?”

“A moment more. Just a moment.”

Three times in a clockwise way the Coronal rubbed the rohilla that was pinned to his collar. Then he dipped both his thumbs in an ivory vessel containing some bluish fluid and touched them to his eyelids. With bowed head and closed eyes the Coronal murmured something that sounded like the words “Adabambo, adabamboli, adambo,” which meant nothing at all to Korsibar, and pressed the tips of his little fingers and thumbs together. Lastly, Lord Confalume let his breath come forth from his nostrils in along series of quick sighing exhalations, so that after a time his lungs were emptied and his head rested on his sunken chest, shoulders slumped, eyes rolled up toward the top of his head.

Korsibar’s own belief in the powers of magic was as strong as anyone’s. And yet he was surprised and a bit dismayed to see his royal father so deeply enmeshed in these arcane practices, at the cost of who knew what quantity of his waning energies. The expenditure was all too obvious. Lord Confalume’s face was drawn and gray, and he seemed tired, though it was still only mid-morning. There were lines of stress along his brow and cheeks that appeared unfamiliar to Korsibar.

The prince and his sister Thismet were the children of the Coronal’s late middle age, and there was a gap of many decades between his age and theirs; but that difference in age was only now making itself apparent. Indeed, the Coronal had seemed a good deal younger to Korsibar earlier that day in the antechamber to the Hall of Justice than he looked at this moment, but perhaps that look of youthful middle age had been a mere pretense, a facade he was capable of donning while in, the presence of the other princes and dukes, and which he no longer had the strength to maintain in the privacy of this meeting with his son.

Seeing his father this wearied, Korsibar’s heart went out to him. The Coronal, he knew, had every reason to be weary, and not just from the exertions of these sorceries. For the past forty-three years, a span of time unimaginable to Korsibar, the Coronal Lord Confalume had had the task of reigning over this giant planet. To be sure, he reigned in the name of the Pontifex, and it was the Pontifex in whom all ultimate responsibility for decision was vested. But the Pontifex lived hidden away in the secrecy and security of the Labyrinth. It was the Coronal who had to remain endessly on public display, holding open court at the Castle atop the Mount, and going forth into the world as well, every six or eight years, to fulfill the custom of the grand processional by which the Coronal presented himself in person in every major city of all three continents.

In making the grand processional it was the junior monarch’s task to convey himself beyond the Fifty Cities of the Mount, and onward across the sea to distant Zimroel and its great metropolis of Ni-moya, and grim Piliplok of the terrifyingly straight streets, and Khyntor and Dulorn and flowery Til-omon and Pidruid and all those other faraway places whose existence was barely more than legendary to Korsibar; displaying himself to the multitudes as the living symbol of the system that had governed this gigantic world since the dawn of its historic period so many thousands of years before. Small wonder Lord Confalume looked tired. He had lived long enough to have made the grand processional not once but five times. He had carried all of Majipoor on his shoulders for some years longer than four full decades.

Korsibar stood a long time waiting, and said nothing. And waited some more. And still the Coronal busied himself with his sorcery-things, as though he had forgotten Korsibar was there. And Korsibar waited.

And went on waiting. When the Coronal required one to wait, one waited, and did not question the waiting. Even if he were one’s own father.

After a long while Lord Confalume looked up at last, and blinked a couple of times at Korsibar as though he were surprised to see him in the room. Then the Coronal said, with no preamble, “You amazed me more than a little this morning, Korsibar. I never imagined you’d have the slightest objection to starting the games early.”

“I confess some amazement at your amazement, Father. Do you perceive me as such a shallow thing? Do you look on me as having no sense whatever of proper conduct?”

“Have I ever given you reason to think so?”

“You give me no reason to think otherwise. All my adult life I’ve simply been left free to amuse myself, like some oversized child. Am I invited to sit in on councils? Am I given high responsibilities and duties? No. No. What I’m given is a happy life of leisure and sport. —‘Here, Korsibar how do you like this fine sword? This saddle, this bow of Khyntor workmanship? —These fiery-tempered racing-mounts have just been sent to us from the breeders at Marraitis, Korsibar: take your pick, boy, the best is none too good for you. —Where will you hunt this season, Korsibar? In the northern marches, perhaps, or will it be in the jungles of Pulidandra?’ And so it has been, Father, all my life.”

The Coronal’s tired face seemed to sag into an even deeper weariness as Korsibar’s verbal barrage went on and on.

“That was the life you wanted for yourself,” he said, when the prince had subsided. “Or so I believed.”