Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“And will the same thing happen to you, do you think? Will the Lord Dekkeret of the poems that will be written five thousand years from now be ninety-five percent fable too?”

“Of course. Lord Dekkeret and Lady Fulkari both. Somewhere right in The Book of Changes Aithin Furvain himself tells us that Stiamot once heard someone singing a ballad about one of his victories over the Metamorphs, and wept because everything they were saying about him in that song was wrong. And even that is probably a fable too. Varaile once told me that they were singing songs in the marketplace about Prestimion’s struggle with Dantirya Sambail, and the Prestimion they sang about was nothing like the Prestimion she knew. It’ll be the same with us someday, Fulkari. Trust me on that.”

Fulkari’s eyes were glistening. “Imagine it: poems about us, Dekkeret, five thousand years from now! The heroic saga of your great campaign against Mandralisca and the Five Lords! I’d love to read one of those—wouldn’t you?”

“I’d love to know what the poet tells us about how things turned out for Lord Dekkeret, anyway,” said Dekkeret, staring down somberly at the ancient tomb in the plaza below. “Does the saga finish with a happy ending for the gallant Coronal, I wonder? Or is it a tragedy?” He shrugged. “Well, at least we won’t have to wait five thousand years to find out.”

There was no escaping a second ceremony at the tomb this time, and a visit to the temple of the Lady atop Alaisor Heights, the second holiest shrine to the Lady in the world, and a formal dinner at the celebrated Hall of Topaz in the palace of the Lord Mayor of Alaisor, Manganan Esheriz. And as the weeks went by there were other official events as well, a numbing succession of them, as Alaisor took full advantage of the unusual fact of a Coronal’s extended presence in the city.

But Dekkeret spent as much of his time as possible planning his tour of Zimroel: the landing at Piliplok, the journey up the Zimr, the entry into Ni-moya. He learned the names of local officials, he studied maps, he sought to identify potential trouble spots along the way. The trick would be to arrive at the head of a huge army while still managing to carry off the pretense that this was only a peaceful grand processional undertaken for the purpose of introducing the new Coronal to his western subjects. Of course, if he should find a rebel army waiting for him when he landed at Piliplok, or if Mandralisca had gone so far as to blockade the sea against him, he would have no choice but to meet force with force. But that remained to be seen.

The summer ticked along. The time soon would come, Dekkeret knew, when the season changed and the winds turned contrary, blowing so vigorously out of the west that departure would have to be postponed for many months. He wondered if he had misjudged the timing, had spent so much time assembling his fleet that the invasion must be delayed until spring, and his enemies given that much more time to dig themselves in.

But at last everything seemed propitious for departure, and the winds still were favorable.

His flagship was called the Lord Stiamot. Of course: the local hero, the Coronal whose name was a synonym for triumph. Dekkeret suspected the ship had formerly borne some less resounding name and had hastily been renamed on his behalf, but he saw no harm in that. “Let that name be an omen of our coming success,” Gialaurys said with gruff exuberance, pointing to the golden lettering on the hull as they went aboard. “The conqueror! The greatest of warriors!”

“Indeed,” said Dekkeret.

Gialaurys was exuberant also—indeed, he was the only one—when Piliplok harbor finally came into view, many weeks later, after a slow and windy crossing of the Inner Sea made notable by the presence of a great band of sea-dragons that stayed close at hand much of the way. The huge aquatic beasts frisked and frolicked about Dekkeret’s fleet with alarming playfulness day after day, lashing the choppy blue-green sea with their immense fluked tails and sometimes rising from the water, tail first, to display nearly their entire awesome bodies. The sight of them was exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But at last the dragons vanished to starboard, disappearing into the next phase of whatever mysterious journeys the sea-dragons were wont to make in the course of their endless circlings of the world.

Then the sea changed color, darkening to a muddy gray, for the voyagers had reached the point off shore where the first traces of the silt and debris carried into the ocean by the Zimr could be detected. The huge river, in its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel, transported untold tons of such stuff eastward. At its gigantic mouth, sixty miles across and wider, all that tremendous load was swept into the sea, staining it for hundreds of miles out from shore. The sight of that stain meant that Piliplok city could not be far away.

And then, finally, the shore of Zimroel came into view. The chalky mile-high headland just north of Piliplok that marked the place where the great mouth of the Zimr met the sea stood out brightly against the horizon.

Gialaurys was the first to spy the actual city. “Piliplok ho!” he bellowed. “Piliplok! Piliplok!”

Piliplok, yes. Was a hostile fleet waiting there for him, Dekkeret wondered?

It did not appear that way. The only vessels in view were mercantile ones, moving about their business as though nothing at all were amiss. Evidently Mandralisca—unless he had some surprise up his sleeve—did not intend to deny the Coronal of Majipoor the right to land on Zimroel’s soil. To defend the continent’s entire perimeter against invasion was, after all, an enormous task, possibly beyond the rebels’ resources.

Mandralisca must be drawing a line somewhere closer to Ni-moya, Dekkeret decided.

Gialaurys could barely contain his delight as his birthplace came into view. Joyfully he clapped his hands. “Ah, there’s a city for you, Dekkeret! Take a good look, my lord! Is that a city, or isn’t it, eh, my lord?”

Well, he had every reason to smile at the sight of his native city. But Dekkeret, who had been to Piliplok before on his trip with Akbalik, knew what to expect of it, and he greeted the place with none of the old Grand Admiral’s glee. Piliplok was not his idea of urban beauty. It was a city that only its natives could love.

And Fulkari gasped in outright shock at her first glimpse of it as they entered the harbor. “I knew it wasn’t supposed to be beautiful, but even so, Dekkeret—even so—could it have been some lunatic who laid this place out? Some crazed mathematician in love with his own insane plan?”

That had been Dekkeret’s reaction too, that other time, and the city had grown no lovelier in the twenty-odd years of his absence. From the central point of its splendid harbor its eleven great highways fanned out in rigidly straight spokes, crossed with unerring precision by curving bands of streets. Each band delimited a district of different function—the marine warehouses, the commercial quarter, the zone of light industry, the residential areas, and so forth—and within each district every building was of an architectural style unique to that district, every structure looking precisely like its neighbor. Each district’s prevailing style had only one thing in common with the styles of its neighbors, which was that they all were characterized by a singular heaviness and brutality of design that oppressed the eye and burdened the heart.

“In Suvrael, where hardly any trees or shrubs of the northern continents can survive our heat and powerful sunlight,” said Dinitak, “we plant what we can, palms, tough succulents, even the poor scrawny things of the desert, for the sake of giving our cities some beauty. But here in this benevolent coastal climate, where anything at all will grow, the good folk of Piliplok seem to choose to grow nothing at all!” Shaking his head, he pointed toward shore. “Do you see a stem anywhere, Dekkeret, a branch, a leaf, a flower? Nothing. Nothing!”