Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“If there is to be a war,” said Septach Melayn after a time, and there was an odd tension in his voice, “then I have a favor to ask of you, Prestimion.”

“There will be a war. We have no alternative but to eradicate those creatures.”

“Well, then, when the war begins,” Septach Melayn went on, “I trust you will permit me to play a part in it.”

“And me as well,” said Gialaurys quickly.

Prestimion did not find these requests at all surprising.

Of course he had no intention of granting them; but it pleased him that the fires of valor still burned so strongly in these two. Did they not understand, he wondered, that their fighting days were over?

Gialaurys, like so many big-bodied men of enormous physical strength, had never been famous for his suppleness or agility, though that had not mattered in his years as a warrior. But, as also tends to happen to many men of his build, he had thickened greatly with age, and he moved now in a terribly slow and careful way.

Septach Melayn, whip-thin and eternally limber, seemed as quick and lithe as he had been long ago, essentially unchanged by the years. But the network of fine lines around his penetrating blue eyes told a different story, and Prestimion suspected that that famous cascade of tumbling ringlets had more than a little white hair mixed now with the gold. It was hardly possible that he still could have the lightning-swift reflexes that had made him invincible in hand-to-hand combat.

Prestimion knew that the battlefield was no place for either of them these days, any more than it was for him.

Delicately he said, “The war, as I know you understand, will be Dekkeret’s to fight, not mine or yours. But he’ll be apprised of your offers. I know that he’ll want to draw on your skill and experience.”

Gialaurys chuckled heavily. “I can see us entering into Ni-moya now, sweeping all opposition aside. What a day that will be, when we go marching six abreast up Rodamaunt Promenade! And it will have been my great pleasure personally to lead the troops north from Piliplok. The invasion army will land in Piliplok, of course.—And you know, Prestimion, what we rough men from Piliplok think of those soft Ni-moyans and their eternal pursuit of pleasure. What joy it will be for us to knock down their flimsy gates and march into their pretty city!” He rose and walked about the room, making such effeminate mincing gestures that a roar of delighted laughter came from Septach Melayn. “ ‘Shall we go to the Gossamer Galleria today to buy a fine robe, my dear?’ ” said Gialaurys in a high-pitched strangled voice. “ ‘And then, I think, dinner at the Narabal Island. The breast of gammigammil with thognis sauce, how I adore it! The Pidruid oysters! Oh, my dear—!’ ”

Prestimion too was holding his sides. This sort of performance was nothing that he would ever have expected from the gruff Gialaurys.

Septach Melayn said in a more serious way, when the merriment had subsided a little, “What do you think, Prestimion? Will Dekkeret really choose to land in Piliplok, as Gialaurys says? I think there are some difficulties in that.”

“There are difficulties in anything we do,” said Prestimion, and his mood grew grim again as he contemplated the realities of the war he was so passionately determined to launch.

It was a fine brave thing to cry out for an end, at long last, to the iniquities of the Sambailids and their venomous chief minister. But he had no idea of the true depth of the Five Lords’ support in Zimroel. Suppose it was already possible for Mandralisca to assemble an army of a million soldiers to defend the western continent against an attack by the Coronal? Or five million? How would Dekkeret raise an army big enough to meet such a force? How would the troops be transported to Zimroel? Would transporting that many men even be possible? And, if so, at what a cost? The armaments needed, the ships, the provisions—

And then, the invasion itself—the glint in Gialaurys’s eyes as he spoke of rough men of Piliplok knocking down the flimsy gates of Ni-moya brought no corresponding thrills of delight to Prestimion. Ni-moya was one of the wonders of the world. Was it worth putting that incomparable city to the torch merely for the sake of maintaining the world’s present system of laws and rulers?

He would not let himself waver from his belief that it was necessary and inevitable to go to war. Mandralisca was a blight upon the world, a blight that could only spread and spread and spread if it were left unchecked. He could not be tolerated; he could not be appeased; he must be destroyed.

But, Prestimion thought gloomily, would the people of future times ever forgive him for it? He had wanted his reign to be known as a golden age. He had bent every effort toward that goal. And yet, somehow, the years of his ascendance had been marked by catastrophe upon catastrophe—the Korsibar war, the plague of insanity that followed it, the rebellion of Dantirya Sambail—and now it seemed certain that the final achievement of his reign would be either the destruction of Ni-moya or else the partition of what had been a peaceful world into a pair of mutually hostile independent kingdoms.

Both choices seemed equally hateful. But then Prestimion reminded himself of his brother Teotas, terror-stricken to the point of suicidal madness and scrambling about in a panicky haze atop some precarious parapet of the Castle. His little daughter Tuanelys, writhing in fear in her own bed. And how many other innocent people across the world, random victims of Mandralisca’s malevolence?

No. The thing had to be done, no matter the cost. He forced himself to harden his soul around that thought.

As for Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, they were already caught up in the anticipation of the glorious military campaign that they hoped would cap their years. And were, as usual, disagreeing: Prestimion heard Septach Melayn, his eyes agleam, saying, “Is utterly idiotic, my dear friend, the whole idea of landing at Piliplok. Don’t you think Mandralisca can figure out that that’s where we’d have to come ashore? Piliplok’s the easiest port in the world to defend. He’ll have half a million armed men waiting for us at the harbor, and the river behind them blockaded by a thousand ships. No, sweet Gialaurys, we’ll have to put our troops ashore well south of there. Gihorna’s the place, say I. Gihorna!”

Gialaurys screwed his face into a mask of contempt. “Gihorna’s a wasteland, a dismal swamp, uninhabitable, altogether abominable. The Shapeshifters themselves won’t go near the place. Mandralisca won’t even need to fortify it. Our men will sink into the mud and vanish as soon as they step out of their landing-craft.”

“On the contrary, my dear Gialaurys. It’s precisely because the Gi-horna coast is so unappealing that Mandralisca is unlikely to think we’ll land there. But we can, and will. And then—”

“—And then we march north for thousands of miles up the side of the continent to Piliplok, which according to you we should avoid doing because it is the easiest port in the world to defend and Mandralisca’s army will be waiting for us there, or else we have to turn west right into the dark jungles of the Shapeshifter reservation and head for Ni-moya that way. Do you really want that, Septach Melayn? To send the whole army into the perils of unknown Piurifayne on its way north? What kind of insanity is that? I’d rather take my chances on a straightforward Piliplok landing and fight whatever battle we have to fight there. If we follow the jungle route the filthy Metamorphs will pounce on us and—”

“Stop it, both of you!” Prestimion said, in a tone of such vehement insistence that Septach Melayn and Gialaurys both turned toward him wide-eyed. “All this arguing is completely pointless. Dekkeret is the commanding general who will fight this war. Not you. Not me. These matters of strategy are for him to decide.”