Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

They continued to stare at him. They both looked shaken; and not only, Prestimion thought, on account of the harshness with which he had just spoken to them. It was his abdication of command, he suspected, that amazed them so. That was not at all like the Prestimion they had known all these years, to cut off this kind of debate by saying that such a matter of high policy was outside his jurisdiction. He was amazed at it himself.

But Dekkeret was Coronal now, not Prestimion; Dekkeret was the one who would have to prosecute this war; it was up to Dekkeret to devise the best way to go about it. Prestimion, as the senior monarch, could offer advice, and would. But it was Dekkeret to whom the ultimate responsibility for the war’s success must fall, and the final word on strategy had to be his.

Prestimion told himself that he was content with that. The system of government to which he was dedicated, the age-old system that had worked so well since Dvorn the Pontifex had devised it, required it of him. So long as Dekkeret, his chosen successor as Coronal, conducted the war bravely and effectively, it was right and proper for Prestimion himself, as Pontifex, to retire to a secondary role in the conflict. And Prestimion had no doubt that Dekkeret would.

In a quieter tone he said, “A little more wine, gentlemen?”

Someone was knocking at the door, though. Septach Melayn went to open it.

It was the Lady Varaile, who had gone off for a time to be with the children. Tuanelys was still troubled by dreams; and Varaile herself looked careworn and weary, suddenly older than her years. Merely to see her in this condition was enough to inflame Prestimion’s wrath all over again: he would kill Mandralisca with his own hands, if ever he had the chance.

She was holding a slip of paper. “There’s been a message from Dekkeret,” she said. “He’s in Klai, less than a day’s journey away. And hopes to be here tomorrow.”

“Good,” Prestimion said. “Excellent. Did he have anything else to say?”

“Only that he sends the Pontifex his love and respect, and looks forward to his reunion with him.”

“As do I,” said Prestimion warmly.

He realized, suddenly, how very tired he was of the responsibilities of great power, and how much he had come to depend on Dekkeret’s youthful vigor and strength. It would be good to see him, yes. And especially good to discover how he, Dekkeret, planned to cope with this crisis. For that is not my task but his, thought Prestimion, and how glad I am of that!

A time will come when you’ll be eager to be Pontifex, Confalume had told him once, in the old Pontifex’s rooms in the Labyrinth just a few days before his death. Yes. And now it had. For the first time Prestimion understood to the depths of his spirit what the old man had been talking about that day.

The last time Dekkeret had been in Stoien city had been in the second or third year of Prestimion’s reign as Coronal, a time when he was merely an earnest young newcomer to the inner circles of Castle Mount without the faintest expectation of becoming Coronal himself. Stoien awakened old memories for him, and not all of them were fond ones.

The eerie, unforgettable beauty of the city, matchlessly situated along a hundred miles of lovely white beaches here on the rim of the Stoienzar Peninsula: that had remained fresh in his mind all these years. Nor had Stoien changed in any way. Its skies were still cloudless. Its curious buildings, rising from the peninsula’s flat terrain on artificial platforms anywhere from ten feet in height to hundreds, still dazzled the eye as they had before; its lush vegetation, the omnipresent denseness of bushes with leaves brilliant with irregular bursts of indigo and topaz and sapphire, of cobalt and claret and vermilion, still set the soul ablaze with delight. Such damage as had been done by the fires that madmen had set during the chaos of the insanity plague had long since been repaired.

But it was in Stoien that Dekkeret had taken leave for the last time of his dear friend and mentor Akbalik of Samivole, Akbalik who had been his guide in his earliest years in Prestimion’s service at the Castle. Akbalik whom Dekkeret had loved more than any other man, even Prestimion—Akbalik who in all probability would be Coronal now, if he had lived—it was here to Stoien that Akbalik had come, limping and in pain from the swamp-crab bite that he had suffered while hunting for the fugitive Dantirya Sambail in the steaming jungles east of the city, and which would kill him not long afterward. “The wound is nothing,” Akbalik told Dekkeret when Dekkeret arrived in Stoien after a voyage to the Isle, to which he had gone bearing urgent messages for Lord Prestimion. “The wound will heal.”

But perhaps Akbalik had already known that it would not, for he had also exacted from Dekkeret an oath promising that he would speak out against anything that Lord Prestimion might want to do that would put his life at risk, such as chasing after Dantirya Sambail into the same jungles where Akbalik had been bitten: “No matter how angry you make him, no matter what risks to your own career you run, you must keep him from doing anything so rash.” Which Dekkeret had sworn, though inwardly he felt it should be Akbalik’s task, not his, to say such things to the Coronal; and then Akbalik had set out eastward from Stoien across Alhanroel, escorting the Lady Varaile—pregnant then with the future Prince Taradath—back to Castle Mount. But he made it no farther than Sisivondal on the inland plateau before the poison in his wound killed him.

All that was long ago. Now the winds of fortune had made Dekkeret Coronal. Prince Akbalik of Samivole was remembered only by middle-aged folk. The only Prince Akbalik of whom most people were aware was Prestimion’s second son, named in the other Akbalik’s honor. But the sight of Stoien’s strange and wondrous myriad of towers brought that first Akbalik, that calm, wise, gray-eyed man who had meant so much to Dekkeret, vividly back to life in his memory, and a great sadness came over him at the recollection.

To make it even worse, Prestimion and his family were settled in the very same lodgings they had had on that earlier occasion, the royal suite of the Crystal Pavilion, and they had put Dekkeret and his companions up there also. Nothing could have been better designed to force him to relive the final exhausting moments of the war against Dantirya Sam-bail, when Prestimion, making use of the Barjazid helmet, had struck against the Procurator from this very building, aided wherever possible by Dinitak and Maundigand-Klimd and the Lady Therissa and Dekkeret himself.

But there was no other choice, really. The Crystal Pavilion was Stoien’s premier building, the only place in the city suitable to house a visiting monarch.—Or, in this case, a pair of monarchs: for here were Coronal and Pontifex both in Stoien at the same time, a thing that never had happened before, and that had, so Dekkeret learned before he had been in Stoien more than ten minutes, thrown the city administration into such a state of panicky confusion that they would need the rest of their lives to recover from it.

It was fairly late in the evening when Dekkeret and his party arrived. He was caught a little off balance by the discovery that Prestimion wanted to meet with him at once. Dekkeret had had a hectic journey down the coast from Alaisor—he had not anticipated that Prestimion would come so quickly from the Isle to the mainland—and he begged an hour’s respite, or two, to rest and cleanse himself from the dust of the road before seeing the Pontifex.

Fulkari wondered why it was necessary to have such an immediate conference. “Is it really so urgent? Can’t we be allowed some time for dinner first, and a night’s sleep?”