Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

He staggers on. Twice he falls, and twice he claws his way to his feet, feeling the harsh scratch of bone on bone, the thick rustle of dark blood pushing through narrowed arteries. He would not have believed that being old could be such agony. Darkness comes swiftly. He finds himself deep in starless moonless night and is grateful that he no longer has to look upon his own body. “Fiorinda?” he croaks, but there is no response. He is alone. He has never been anything but alone.

A light, now, blinks into being in the distance, and rapidly intensifies to become a cone of luminous green, widening to fill the heavens, a geyser of pale radiance spurting aloft. As the wind sweeps through it, it stirs swirls of a grayer color, whirlpools of light within light. Accompanying this outburst of brightness is a rushing, whispering sound, like the murmur of distant water. He also hears what sounds like subterranean laughter, resonant, slippery. He goes forward, entering a sort of green cloud that seeps from the ground. The air is electric. His pores tingle. A sour smell drifts upward in his nostrils. His bent and aching body sweats and steams. There is what seems to be a mountain ahead, but as he moves on through the cloud Teotas realizes that what he sees is a giant living thing, squat and enormous and incomprehensible, sitting upright on a kind of throne.

A god? A demon? An idol? Its brown, leathery skin is thick and glossy, and ridged like a reptile’s hide. Its massive body is low and long, blunt-snouted, goggle-eyed, with a high vaulting back, fat sides, bulging belly, pedestal-like underparts. Teotas has never seen a creature so huge. That mouth alone—

That mouth—

That gaping mouth—

Teotas is unable to halt himself. The mouth yawns like the entrance to the cavern of caverns, and he marches onward, no longer moving with difficulty: gliding, rather, speeding toward that mouth, rushing toward it—

Wider and wider. That great cavern fills the sky. A terrible bellowing comes from it, loud enough to shake the ground. Landslides begin; rocks fall in thundering avalanches; there is no place to take refuge except within the mouth itself, that waiting mouth, that eternally gaping mouth—

Teotas rushes forward into the blackness.

“It’s all right,” someone is saying. “A dream, only a dream! Teotas—please, Teotas—”

He was bathed in sweat, shivering, a huddled heap. Fiorinda cradled him in her arms, murmuring an unending flow of soothing words. Gradually he could feel himself coming back from the nightmare, though its residue, like an oily slick, still laps at the edges of his mind.

“Only a dream, Teotas! It wasn’t real!”

He nodded. What could he say, how to explain? “Yes. Only a dream.”

Prestimion said, “So now it’s finally over and done with, all the jolly festivals and amusements. Now the real work begins, eh, Dekkeret?”

It had taken him back to earlier days, these weeks of formal ceremonies that marked the end of the old reign and the beginning of the new. He had been through all this once before, only that time he was the one whose ascent to the throne was being celebrated. The influx of coronation gifts from all over the world—had he ever actually unpacked more than a fraction of those myriad boxes and crates?—the rite of the passing of the crown, the coronation banquet, the recitals from The Book of Changes, the chanting of The Book of Powers, the passing and repassing of the wine-bowls, the gathered lords of the realm rising to make the starburst salute and cry out the greeting to the new Coronal—

“Prestimion!” they had cried. “Lord Prestimion! Hail, Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!” So long ago! It seemed to him now that his entire reign as Coronal had gone by in the twinkling of an eye, and now here he was mysteriously transformed into a man of middle years, no longer as buoyant and impulsive as he once had been, nor as good-humored, either—a little testy at times, indeed, he would admit—and now they had done it all once again, the immemorial rituals played out anew, but this time the name they called was that of Dekkeret, Dekkeret, Lord Dekkeret, while he himself looked on from one side, smiling, willingly surrendering his share of glory to the new monarch.

But some part of him would always be Coronal, he knew.

His boyish younger self stood before him in the mirror of his memory like some other person, that youthful, agile Prestimion of two decades ago: that endlessly resilient young man who had survived the humiliation of the Korsibar usurpation and the ghastly bloodlettings of the civil war, to make himself Coronal despite all. How he had fought for it! It had cost him a brother, and a lover, and much bodily suffering besides, nights camped on muddy shores, days spent trekking through the deadliest desert this side of Suvrael, mounts shot out from beneath him on the battlefield, wounds whose scars he still carried. Dekkeret was fortunate to have been spared any of that, let alone anything like a repetition of it. His rise to the throne had been orderly and normal. It was a much simpler way to become king.

Everything should have been simple for me, too, Prestimion thought. But that was not the fate that the Divine had in mind for me.

He stood with Dekkeret— Lord Dekkeret—in the Confalume throne-chamber, just the two of them, amid the echoes. As they looked far across the floor of brilliant yellow gurnawood to the throne itself, that massive block of ruby-streaked black opal rising on its stepped pedestal of dark mahogany, Dekkeret said, “You’ll miss it, I know. Go on, Prestimion: climb up there one last time, if you like. I’ll never tell.”

Prestimion smiled. “I never cared to sit on it when I was Coronal. It would feel even wronger for me to sit on it now.”

“But you took your place on that throne often enough when you were king, and you put a good face on it then.”

“It was my job to put a good face on it, Dekkeret. But now the job’s yours. I have no business up there, even for sentiment’s sake.”

He continued to ponder the great throne, though, for a time. He could not help, even now, but be amused by the pretentiousness of the astoundingly costly throne-room Confalume had so grandly thrust into the heart of the Castle, and the throne itself that was its jewel. But at the same time he honored it for the symbol of rightful power that it was, and for the way it summoned up in his mind the memory of Confalume himself, who in some senses had been more of a father to him than his own.

At length he said, “You know, Dekkeret, we have to take the old man’s gaudy throne very seriously while we’re seated upon it. We need to believe with every fiber of our souls in its majesty. Because what we really are are performers, you know, and there’s our stage. And for the little time we strut that stage, we need to believe that the play is real and important: for if we don’t seem to believe it, who else will want to?”

“Yes. Yes, I do comprehend that, Prestimion.”

“But now I have a different stage for myself, and no one will see me moving back and forth upon it.—Let’s get ourselves out of this place, shall we?” Prestimion gave the great throne a final, almost fond, glance.

They crossed from the throne-room into to the judgment-hall, a room of his own making. It was of no trifling degree of splendor itself. Would they think, someday, that the ancient Lord Prestimion had been a man as much given to ostentatiousness and grand display as his predecessor Lord Confalume? Well, let them think it, then. That was nothing for him to concern himself over. History would invent its own Prestimion, as it had invented its own Stiamot, its own Arioc, its own Guadeloom. It was a process with which no man could interfere. He was probably well on his way toward becoming mythical already.