Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“That’s the Count’s palace, isn’t it?” Dinitak asked, pointing over the inner parapet. “It looks very different from this angle. But just as hideous.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.” Dekkeret felt his mood suddenly darkening. A throbbing began in his temples. He walked toward the parapet for a better view, and found two of Count Considat’s black-uniformed security men in his way. He gesticulated at them with such ferocity that they must have thought he meant to fling them over the side. Hastily they moved back.

Dekkeret stared down into the plaza in front of the palace. His face became bleak. His lips were tightly clamped. He pressed the tips of his fingers to the sides of his head and slowly rubbed the area just above his cheekbones.

“What’s wrong?” Dinitak asked, when some little while had gone by without a word from him.

“We would have a perfect view of the assassination attempt from up here,” said Dekkeret quietly. He sketched out the scene for Dinitak with quick movements of his hand. “Lord Prestimion has just arrived in the plaza. There’s his floater, sitting right down there. He steps out of it. Gialaurys walks at his left side. Akbalik is to the right of him. You never knew Akbalik, did you? He died just around the time you were joining us in Stoien city for the final attack on Dantirya Sambail. A wonderful man, Ak-balik was. He should be the one about to become Coronal, not me.—And there’s Count Meglis on the palace steps, three or four steps from the bottom. The stupid bastard is simply standing there, waiting for Prestimion to go to him, when it’s supposed to be the other way around. Prestimion isn’t expecting that. He waits for Meglis to finish coming down the steps, but he doesn’t, and for a couple of moments neither of them moves.”

Dekkeret fell silent.

“And where were you standing?” Dinitak asked. “You told me that you were there that day, that you saw the whole thing.”

“Yes. Yes. There was a huge crowd, over there on the left, where the plaza runs into that big boulevard. Thousands of people. Guards holding us back. I’m practically at the front, on that side. The second row.”

Dekkeret sighed. It was followed by another brooding silence.

Dinitak said, “Then what? The assassin bursts out of the crowd, swinging his sickle? Someone yells to warn the Coronal. The guards move in and cut the man down.”

“No. A girl comes out first—”

“A girl?”

“A beautiful girl, very tall, curling reddish-gold hair. Sixteen years old. Sithelle, her name was. My cousin. Standing just in front of me, right against the rope that’s holding the crowd back. She adored Lord Prestimion. We got up at dawn to get a good position up in front. She was carrying a bouquet that she had woven herself, hundreds of flowers. Was planning to throw it toward the Coronal, so I assumed. But no. No.” Dekkeret’s voice had become a dull low monotone. “She bends down and wriggles under the rope and slips past the guards so that she can hand the flowers to Prestimion. A very unwise thing to do. But he’s amused. He signals to the guards to let her approach. He takes the flowers from her. Asks her a question or two. And then—”

“The man with the sickle?”

“Yes. Skinny man with a beard. Crazy look in his eye. He comes charging out of nowhere, heading straight for Prestimion. Sithelle doesn’t see him coming, but she hears footsteps, I guess, and she turns, and he chops at her with the sickle to get her out of his way.” Dekkeret snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Blood everywhere—her throat—”

In a hushed voice Dinitak said, “He kills her, your cousin?”

“She must have died almost instantly.”

“And then the guards kill him.”

“No,” Dekkeret said. “I do.”

“You?”

“The assassin had been standing five or six places to my left. I came running out of the crowd right after him—I don’t know how I got past the restraining rope, don’t remember that part of it at all, only that I was out there, and I could see Sithelle with her hand across her throat trying to hold the cut together as she started to fall, and Prestimion standing there frozen with the man with the sickle raising his arm, and Gialaurys and Akbalik starting to move in from the sides but not fast enough. I grabbed the assassin’s arm and twisted it until it broke. Then I put my arm around his neck and broke that too. And picked up Sithelle—she was dead by then, that I knew—and walked off into the crowd with her, straight down Spurifon Boulevard into Old Town. No one stopped me. People moved away from me as I approached. Her blood was all over me. I took her to her house and told her parents what had happened. It was the most dreadful hour of my life. It has stayed with me ever since.”

“You loved her? You wanted to marry her, did you? You were promised to each other?”

“Oh, no. Nothing of the sort. I loved her, yes, of course, but not in that way. We were cousins, remember. Raised practically like brother and sister. Our families wanted us to marry, but I never had any serious thought of it.”

“And she?”

Dekkeret managed a thin smile. “She may have had some fantasy of marrying Lord Prestimion. I know she had pictures of him tacked up all over her room. But nothing could ever have come of that, and she probably realized it. Very possibly she may have been in love with me, I suppose. We were so young then—what did either of us know—?”

He looked down again into the plaza. Was that her blood still staining the cobbles of the plaza?

No. No, he told himself, stop being ridiculous!

Dinitak said, “In fact you were in love with her, I think.”

“No. I’m sure I wasn’t, not then. But—the Divine help me, Dinitak!—something has gradually come over me since that time. She won’t leave my mind. I look back across the years and I see her, her face, her eyes, her hair, the way she held herself, the way she would run up and down these stairs, the mischief in her glance—and I think, if only she had lived, if only we had had a chance to grow up a little—” Dekkeret shook his head fiercely. “Never mind. She’s been dead now longer than she ever was alive. She has no more reality now than someone who comes to you in a dream. Come: let’s get ourselves away from this place.”

“I’m sorry all this got stirred up for you again, Dekkeret.”

“No matter. It’s there inside me all the time. Seeing the actual site just made it a little worse for a moment.—That same afternoon, you know, Akbalik found me somehow and took me to see Prestimion, who offered to enroll me as a knight-initiate at the Castle as a reward for saving his life, and everything that’s happened to me since has been the direct outcome of what took place down there that terrible day. I remember Prestimion saying to Akbalik, ‘Who knows? We may have found the next Coronal here today.’ His very words. He was joking then, of course.”

“But he was right about that.”

“Yes. So it would seem. A direct line, connecting that boy who came running out of the crowd to save Lord Prestimion with the man who’ll sit someday where Prestimion sits now on the Confalume Throne.” Dekkeret laughed harshly. “Me: Lord Dekkeret! Isn’t that astounding, Dinitak?”

“Not to me. But I do sometimes think you have trouble believing you’re actually going to be Coronal.”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were the one?”

“But I’m not the one, and never will be, the Divine be thanked. I’m quite content being who I am.”

“As am I, Dinitak. I’m in no hurry to take over Prestimion’s job. If he went on being Coronal for the next twenty years, that would be perfectly all right with—”