Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“Look, sir,” said Jacomin Halefice, and pointed toward the red hills. “We are almost home, I think.”

Almost home, thought Mandralisca, smiling wryly. Yes. For him there was only a somber irony in that phrase.

He was at home, more or less, anywhere and everywhere and nowhere in the world. In his overarching indifference, all places were the same in that regard for him. He had looked upon the perilous jungles of the Stoienzar as his home for a while, and before that a cell in the dungeons of Lord Prestimion’s Castle, and fine lodgings in the rich sprawling metropolis of Ni-moya before that, and he had lived many another place as well, on and on back to his bitter childhood in a forlorn town amidst the snowy peaks of the Gonghar Mountains, a childhood that he would much prefer to forget. For the past five years this arid and obscure district in central Zimroel was the one that he had chosen to define as “home”; and so, looking up at those sun-baked red bluffs now from the border of the sandy inhospitable plain that stretched before him, he was able with some justice to agree with Halefice that he was almost home, for whatever little value that word might hold.

“There are the lords’ palaces now, is that not so, your grace?” said Ja-comin Halefice, jabbing a finger toward the high ridge. The aide-decamp was riding just alongside the Count, astride a fat, placid, pale-lavender mount that was working hard to keep pace with Mandralisca’s more fiery steed.

The Count shaded his eyes and stared upward. “Three of them, anyway. I see Gavinius’s house, and Gavahaud’s, and Gavdat’s.” The sleek gray domes of ceramic tile gleamed with a reddish glint in the hard midday sunlight. “Too soon to make out the other two, I think. Or are you telling me that you’re able to see them already?”

“Actually, I don’t quite think I can manage it yet, sir.”

“Nor I,” said Mandralisca.

The Five Lords, when they had launched their strange and so far quite secretive break with the authority of the central government, had agreed not to make their headquarters in their uncle’s old capital of Ni-moya. That would have been wildly imprudent of them. They were, all five, imprudent men by nature; but sometimes they did listen to reason. At Mandralisca’s suggestion they had agreed to come all the way out here to the sparsely populated and long neglected province of Gornevon, midway between Ni-moya and Verf on the south bank of the Zimr.

The river, though it was readily navigable for its entire seven thousand miles of length, from the Dulorn Rift in the far west to the coastal city of Piliplok on the Inner Sea, was oddly contrary here. Everywhere else along its path fine anchorages abounded and great prosperous urban centers had sprung up in them, a host of rich inland ports—Khyntor, Mazadone, Verf, and any number more, of which group Ni-moya was the grandest, a sublime queen among the cities of the western continent.

But here in Gornevon a line of steep red sandstone bluffs sprang up vertically right at the shoreline of the river’s southern bank. That created an imposing—indeed, impassable—waterfront palisade that stood as an inexorable wall between the river and the lands to the south. Nor was there anything remotely like an anchorage to be found along that stretch of the river, not even a place where small boats could dock.

Which made the Zimr’s southern shore altogether inaccessible in this part of the country, and all commerce had forsaken it. On the other bank, directly opposite the site where the palaces of the Five Lords now stood, was the generous crescent harbor that had brought great wealth to the city of Horvenar; on this side, though, there was nothing but the flat-topped red cliffs, with something very much like a desert to the south of them, a parched useless land that no one had ever seen fit to settle, since there was no access from the river and the land approach from the south was extremely difficult. It was here that Mandralisca had persuaded the Five Lords to situate their capital.

It was a cheerless unwelcoming terrain. Gornevon was an arid province. All of it lay in the shadow of the western branch of the mid-continental Gonghar range, and that long and towering chain of snowy-crested precipices prevented the summer rains that blew from the southeast, out of the Shapeshifter lands, from getting here. On the other side of the province stood the mile-high wall that was the Velathys Scarp, which intercepted the winter rains that traveled with the west wind out of the Great Sea; and so Gornevon was a sort of pocket desert in the midst of fertile, prosperous Zimroel, one of the driest places in the entire immense continent.

“If only we were coming into Ni-moya now instead, eh?” said Halefice, with a chuckle.

Mandralisca’s response was a thin cool smile. “You love your comforts, don’t you, my friend?”

“Who but a madman—or the Five Lords—would prefer this place to Ni-moya, your grace?”

Mandralisca shrugged. “Who but a madman, indeed? But we go where we must go. Our destiny has sent us here: so be it.”

The five brothers would not have dared, of course, to use Ni-moya as the base for their insurrection, even though it was their family’s ancestral seat, from which their rapacious uncle the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had long ruled Zimroel as a king within the kingdom. Prestimion, having taken Dantirya Sambail prisoner on the battlefield of Thegomar Edge at the conclusion of the Korsibar war, had pardoned him, ultimately, for his perfidious role in the insurrection. The victorious Coronal had left him in possession of his lands and wealth. But he had stripped him of his title of Procurator, and had debarred him from wielding power beyond the boundaries of his own considerable estates. That had been some sixteen years ago. There had been no Procurators in Zimroel ever since.

Dantirya Sambail’s second rebellion had brought him to a bloody end at the hand of Septach Melayn in the marshy forests of the Stoien-zar. His lands had descended to his coarse, brutal brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar. Eventually, after their deaths, the properties had passed to

Gaviundar’s five sons, who yearned to regain the sway over all of Zimroel that their great and terrible uncle once had had; for the central government and its two monarchs, the Pontifex and the Coronal both, were far away on the other and older continent of Alhanroel, where both its capitals were situated.

On populous Zimroel most people felt only the most abstract sort of allegiance to that government. They gave lip service to the Coronal, yes; but it was the power of the Procurator, one of their own, that had always been far more real to them. They had grown accustomed to the reign of their ferocious Procurator. He had been a singularly unlovable man, but under his energetic rule Zimroel had attained much affluence and stability. And therefore it was very likely—so the five sons of Gaviundar told one another—that the people of Zimroel would even after a lapse of a decade and a half choose to accept the Procurator’s legitimate heirs, princes of the true Sambailid blood, as their masters.

Naturally it would not have done to begin any such drive toward power in Ni-moya itself. Ni-moya was the administrative center of the western continent, a hive of Pontifical bureaucrats. Let any member of the Sambailid tribe announce that he intended once more to exercise the old family authority over anything other than the family’s private lands, and immediately word of it would go forth from Ni-moya to the Labyrinth, and from there to the Castle, and in short order a royal army under the Coronal’s command would be setting out for Zimroel to restore matters to their proper order.

Out here in the hinterlands, though, one could do as one wished, even proclaim oneself sovereign over vast domains, and it might be years before word of it filtered back to the Coronal atop Castle Mount or to the Coronal’s own overlord, the Pontifex, in his underground lair. Majipoor was so huge that news often traveled slowly even when carried on swift wings.