Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

To provide the western sector of the city with a focal point that would be as important an attraction in its way as the Central Market was on the eastern side, the ancient planners of Ertsud Grand had dammed up half a dozen of the larger streams, creating the body of water known as the Great Lake. It was perfectly circular and a rich sapphire blue in color, ten miles in circumference and glinting like a giant mirror in the midday sun. All around its shores were the palaces and mansions of wealthy merchants and the city’s nobility, and a host of pleasure-pavilions and sporting parlors. Boats and flat-bottomed barges of the most elaborate sort, painted in bright colors, went back and forth among these buildings all day long.

The Summer Palace, the masterwork of the long-ago and otherwise forgotten Lord Kassarn, was situated on a large artificial island in the Great Lake’s precise center. It was, in fact, two palaces, one within another: an outer one made of pink marble and an inner one fashioned entirely of bamboo canes.

The marble palace was a kind of habitable continuous wall: a joined series of pavilions, their roofs supported by columns inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, with a multitude of apartments and colonnaded cloisters and banquet-halls and courtyards. The guest rooms—there were scores of them, spacious and airy—were decorated with fanciful murals of the lives of the early Coronal Lords. Here, once upon a time, Coronals seeking respite from the routines of the daily business of the Castle would come in summer to hold court and give lavish feasts for their chief lords, the nobility of the cities of the Mount, and visiting dignitaries.

Within this ringlike marble building, which occupied the entire perimeter of the island, was an extensive park where wild animals of many sorts were allowed to roam—gibizongs, plaars, semboks and dimilions, shy and dainty bilantoons, prancing spiral-horned gambulons, small furry krefts that ran around like animated balls of fluff with stiff upraised tails, and a herd of fifty white kibrils whose red eyes blazed in their broad foreheads like huge rubies. And at the very heart of the park was the Summer Palace proper, intended as the Coronal’s private refuge.

It was most elegantly designed, made of the sturdy black bamboo of Sippulgar, which has canes nearly as hard as iron. The canes were six inches in diameter, cut to twenty-foot lengths, gilded, and bound by silken cords. Not a single nail had been used anywhere. The roof also was made of bound lengths of Sippulgar cane, varnished annually with the red sap of the grifafa tree, which preserved it against all decay. Interior columns, these likewise of bamboo canes tied three together, formed its supports. Sea-dragon emblems in red surmounted each column.

The Summer Palace stood on a little hillock that lifted it above the rest of the island, affording the Coronal a vista of the distant shores of the Great Lake. So artfully had the building been constructed that it would be only the work of a single day, supposedly, to dismantle it and shift it to face in a different direction, in case the Coronal should tire of the view from his bedroom and request another. Those who had been allowed to tour the palace in modern times—visiting dukes and counts, members of the families of former Coronals, important captains of industry who had come to Ertsud Grand leading trade missions—were inevitably told of this special feature of its design. In Lord Kassarn’s day, so the story went, the palace was taken down and repositioned every year just before the Coronal came to Ertsud Grand for his summer retreat. Sometimes, at the Coronal’s request, it had been done more frequently than that. But no one actually could remember the last such occasion.

Though visits by Coronals to the Summer Palace had become uncommon events in modern times, and no Coronal at all had gone there during the past thirty-five years, the municipality of Ertsud Grand kept both structures, the marble pavilion and the one of bamboo, constantly in readiness for his lordship’s imminent arrival. Maintenance of the buildings was entrusted to a curator with the title of Major-Domo of the Palaces, and he had a staff of twenty full-time employees who swept the hallways, dusted the paintings and statues, trimmed the shrubbery, fed the beasts of the park, repaired what needed to be repaired, and each week put fresh linens on the beds in all the innumerable rooms.

The position of major-domo was hereditary. For the past five hundred years it had been a perquisite of the family of Eruvni Semivinvor, who had been a kinsman of a famous ancient mayor of Ertsud Grand. The current major-domo—Gopak Semivinvor, the fourth of that name—had held the post for almost half a century, and so it had fallen to him to greet Lord Confalume on the occasion of the second of his two visits to the Summer Palace.

That visit, which had lasted four days, was the high point of Gopak Semivinvor’s life. Again and again he relived it in the years that followed: hailing the Coronal and his wife the Lady Roxivail as they disembarked from the royal barge, conducting them through the marble outer palace and the game park to the bamboo palace, opening their wine for them and personally serving them their first meal, then leaving them together in splendid regal privacy. Public rumor had it that the Coronal’s marriage was a troubled one; Gopak Semivinvor was convinced that Lord Confalume and Lady Roxivail had come to Ertsud Grand in an attempt at reconciliation, and he never ceased to believe that such a reconciliation had indeed taken place during those four days, despite all the subsequent evidence to the contrary.

During the remaining years of Lord Confalume’s reign and the whole of Lord Prestimion’s, Gopak Semivinvor had lived eternally in expectation of the next royal visit. He arose each dawn—the major-domo lived in a cottage in a quiet corner of the game park—and conducted a full inspection of the outer palace and then the inner one, compiling a long list of work for his staff to do before the visiting Coronal’s party arrived. It was a source of great disappointment to him that that visit never came. But still the inspections went on; still the bamboo roofs received their yearly coat of varnish; still the stone-floored halls of the outer palace were swept and the marble building-blocks repointed. Gopak Semivinvor was eighty years old, now. He did not intend to die until he had once more played host to a Coronal in the Summer Palace of Ertsud Grand.

When news of the impending ascension of Prince Dekkeret to the royal throne reached the ears of Gopak Semivinvor, his first response was to consult his magus for a prognostication of the likelihood that the new Coronal would visit the Summer Palace.

Like many people of the era of the Pontifex Prankipin and the Coronal Lord Confalume, Gopak Semivinvor had developed a profound faith in the ability of soothsayers to foretell the future. The particular school of shamans to which he subscribed was based in Triggoin, the capital city of Majipoori sorcery, in northern Alhanroel beyond the desolate Valmambra desert. It was known as the Advocacy of the Four Names; in recent years it had won a wide following in Ert-sud Grand and several neighboring cities of the Mount. Gopak Semivinvor patronized a tall, preternaturally pale Four Names sorcerer named Dobranda Thelk, who was very young for a practitioner of his trade, but had a cold intensity in his gaze that carried a sense of absolute conviction.

Would the Coronal, Gopak Semivinvor asked, soon come calling at the Summer Palace?

Dobranda Thelk closed his glittering eyes for a moment. When he reopened them he seemed to be peering deep into Gopak Semivinvor’s soul.

“It is quite clear that he will come,” said the magus. “But only if the palace is in in good order, and all is in full accordance with expectation.”