Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

Dekkeret halted in his tracks and gasped when he first saw her. “Who is that?” he asked, and on being told that she was the newly arrived niece of the Count of Sipermit, he quickly wangled for her an invitation to a court levee being held the following week by Varaile; and arranged to be there himself, and had her brought up to him for an introduction, and stared at her in such intense fascination that he must have seemed a little mad to her.

“Did any of your ancestors happen to come from Normork?” he asked her, then.

She looked puzzled. “No, excellence. We are Sipermit people, going back thousands of years.”

“Strange. You remind me of someone I once knew there. I am of Normork myself, you know. And there was a certain person—the daughter of my father’s sister, in truth—”

No, no, there was no way to link her to Sithelle. The resemblance was a mere coincidence, uncanny though it was. But Dekkeret lost little time drawing her into his life. Fulkari was a dozen or so years younger than he, and had had no experience in the ways of the court, but she was quick-witted and lively and eager to learn, and fiercely passionate, and not the least bit shy. It was strange, though, holding her in his arms, and seeing that face, so much like Sithelle’s, so close to his own. He and Sithelle had never been lovers, had never even dreamed of such a thing; if anything, he had regarded her more as a sister than a cousin.

Now here he was embracing a woman who seemed almost to be Sithelle reincarnated. At times it felt oddly incestuous. And he wondered: Was he replicating with Fulkari the relationship that he had never had with Sithelle? Was it truly Fulkari that he loved, or was he in love, instead, with the fantasy of his lost Sithelle? That was a considerable problem for him. And it was not the only one she posed for him.

He drew her to him and held her close against him, cheeks touching first, then lips. It made no difference to him that the guardsmen who occupied the post just inside the Dizimaule Arch were watching. Let them watch, he thought.

After a time they stepped back from one another. Her eyes were shining; her breasts rose and fell rapidly beneath the soft, pliant leather.

“Come,” she said, nodding toward the mounts. “Let’s go down into the meadow.”

She vaulted easily into her beast’s natural saddle and took off without waiting for him.

Dekkeret’s mount was a fine slim-legged one of a deep purple color tinged with blue, of the sort specially bred for swiftness and strength. He settled himself easily in the broad saddle that was an integral part of the creature’s back, gripped the pommel that sprouted in the same way just in front of him, and sent the mount speeding forward after her with a quick urgent pressure of his thighs. Cool sweet air streamed past him, lifting and ruffling his unbound hair.

He wondered how many more opportunities he would have to slip away from the Castle like this, a private citizen bound on a journey of private amusement, unattended, unhindered. As Coronal he would rarely if ever be able to go anywhere by himself. His visit to Normork had shown him what was in store for him. There would always be bodyguards about, except when he managed somehow to give them the slip.

But now—the wind in his hair, the bright golden-green sun high overhead, the splendid mount thundering along beneath him, Fulkari racing on ahead—

Below the southern wing of the Castle lay a belt of great open meadows, through the midst of which ran the Grand Calintane Highway, the one traveled by all wayfarers bound for the Castle. There was no day of the year when these meadows were not in bloom, stunning bursts of blue flanked by bright yellow blossoms, masses of white and red, oceans of gold, crimson, orange, violet. The riding track Fulkari had chosen passed to the left of the highway, into the gently sloping countryside that lay above the nearby pleasure-city of High Morpin, ten miles away.

Dekkeret caught up with her after a time and they rode along side by side. They were far enough down the Mount now that the long shadow of the Castle could be seen reaching out before them, tapering to a slender point. Soon the meadowland gave way to a forest of hakkatinga trees, small and straight-trunked, with reddish-brown bark and dense crowns that grew tightly interlaced with their neighbors to form a thick canopy.

Here the mounts could not go as swiftly, and slowed to a canter without being told.

“I missed you so very much,” Fulkari said, as they rode along side by side. “It felt as if you were gone for a month.”

“For me also.”

“Did you have a lot of important meetings to attend as soon as you came back? You must have been terribly busy all day yesterday.”

He hesitated. “I had meetings, yes. I don’t know how important they were. But I had to be there.”

“About the Pontifex? He’s dying, isn’t he? That’s what everybody’s been saying.”

“No one knows,” Dekkeret said. “Until firm news comes from the High Spokesman, we’re all in the dark.”

They had reached a part of the forest now where he and she had been more than once before. The treetops were so closely woven together here that even in mid-morning a kind of twilight dusk prevailed. A small stream ran here, which a colony of dam-building granths had blocked with gnawed logs to form a pretty little pond. Along its margin was a thick, soft azure carpet of sturdy, resilient bubblemoss. It was a lovely little secret bower, sheltered, secluded.

Fulkari dismounted and tethered her reins to a low-hanging branch. He did the same. They faced each other uncertainly. Dekkeret knew that the wisest thing to do was to reach for her now, quickly fold her in his arms, draw her down onto that mossy carpet, before anything could be said that would break the magic of the moment. But he could see that she wanted to speak. She held herself apart from him, moistened her lips, paced restlessly about. Words were struggling to burst free within her. She had not brought him here merely for lovemaking.

“What is it, Fulkari?” he asked, finally.

She said, in a tone dark with tension, “The Pontifex is going to die soon, isn’t he, Dekkeret?”

“It’s as I just told you: I don’t know. No one at the Castle does.”

“But when he does—will you be made Coronal?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said, hating himself for the cowardly evasion.

She was unrelenting. “There can’t be any doubt of it, can there? You’ve already been named Coronal-designate. The Coronal doesn’t ever change his mind and pick someone else, once he does that.—Please, Dekkeret, I want you to be honest with me.”

“I expect to be made Coronal when Confalume dies, yes. If Lord Prestimion asks me, that is, and the Council ratifies.”

“If you’re asked, you’ll accept?”

“Yes.”

“And what will happen to us, then?” Her voice came to him as though from a great distance.

He had no choice now but to go forward with this. “A Coronal should have a consort. I was discussing that very thing with the Lady Varaile last evening.”

“You make it sound so impersonal, Dekkeret. ‘ A Coronal should have a consort. ’ ” She seemed frightened at speaking to him so bluntly, he who soon would be king, and yet there was an angry edge to her tone all the same. “Does it happen that there’s anyone in particular whom you might select to be your consort, perhaps?”

“You know there is, Fulkari. But—”

“But?”

He said, “You’ve made it clear in a thousand ways that you don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”

“Have I?”

“Haven’t you? A minute ago you asked me if I’d accept the throne if it was offered to me. As though it was a fairly common thing for people to refuse to become Coronal, Fulkari. It was last month, I think, that you wanted to know, out of the blue, whether any Coronal-designate had ever turned it down. And before that, that time when you and I were in Amblemorn—”