Lord Prestimion
by Robert Silverberg
The smallest act of a king, his merest cough, has consequences somewhere in the world. As for his greater deeds, they reverberate through all the cosmos forever.
I. The Book of Becoming
1
The coronation ceremony, with its ancient ritual incantations and investitures and ringing trumpet-calls, and the climactic donning of the crown and the royal robes, had ended fifty minutes ago. Now came a space of several hours in the festivities before the celebratory coronation feast. There was a furious, noisy bustling and hustling throughout the vastness of the great building that from this day onward would be known to the world as Lord Prestimion’s Castle, as the thousands of guests and the thousands of servitors made ready for that evening’s grand banquet. Only the new Coronal himself stood apart and alone, in a sphere of echoing silence.
After all the strife and turmoil of civil war, the usurpation and the battles and the defeats and the heartbreak, the hour of victory had come. Prestimion was the anointed Coronal of Majipoor at last, and eager to take up his new tasks.
But—to his great surprise—something troublesome, something profoundly unsettling, had surfaced within him in this glorious hour. The sense of relief and achievement that he had felt at the knowledge that his reign was finally beginning was, he realized, being unexpectedly tempered by a strange core of uneasiness. Why, though? Uneasiness over what? This was his moment of triumph, and he should be rejoicing. And yet—even so—
A powerful hunger for privacy amid all the frenzy of the day had come over him toward the end of the coronation ceremony, and, when it was over, he had abruptly gone off to sequester himself in the immensity of the Great Hall of Lord Hendighail, where he could be alone. That huge room was where the celebratory gifts that had been arriving steadily all month, a river of wonderful things flowing toward the Castle without cease from every province of Majipoor, lay piled in glittering array.
Prestimion had only the haziest notion of when Lord Hendighail had lived—seven, eight, nine hundred years before, something like that—and none at all of the man’s life and deeds. But it was obvious that Hendighail had believed in doing things on a colossal scale. The Hendighail Hall was one of the biggest rooms in the entire enormous Castle, a mighty chamber ten times as long as it was wide, and lofty in proportion, with a planked ceiling of red ghakka-timber supported by groined vaults of black stone whose intricately interwoven traceries were lost in the dimness far overhead.
The Castle, though, was a city in itself, with busy central districts and old, half-forgotten peripheral ones, and Lord Hendighail had caused his great hall to be built on the northern side of Castle Mount, which was the wrong side, the obscure side. Prestimion, although he had lived at the Mount most of his life, could not remember ever having set foot in the Hendighail Hall before this day. In modern times it had been used mainly as a storage depot, where objects that had not yet found their proper places were kept. Which was how it was being employed today: a warehouse for the tribute coming in from all over the world for the new Coronal.
It was packed now with the most astounding assortment of things, a fantastic display of the color and wonder of Majipoor. The custom was, when a new ruler came to the throne, for all the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor to vie with one another in bestowing gifts of great splendor upon him. But this time—so said the old ones, the ones whose memories went back more than forty years to the last coronation—they had outdone themselves in generosity. What had arrived thus far was three, five, ten times as much as might have been expected. Prestimion felt stunned and dazed by the profusion of it all.
He had hoped that inspecting this great flow of gifts from all the farflung districts of the world might lift his spirits in this unexpectedly cheerless moment. Coronation gifts, after all, were meant to tell a new Coronal that the world welcomed him to the throne.
But to his distress he discovered immediately that they were having the opposite effect. There was something disturbing and unhealthy about so much excess. What he wanted the world to be saying to him was that it was happy to have a bold and vigorous young Coronal taking the place of the old and weary Lord Confalume atop Castle Mount. This extraordinary torrent of costly presents was altogether too great a display of gratitude, though. It was extreme; it was disproportionate; it indicated that the world was undergoing a kind of wild frenzy of delight over his accession, altogether out of keeping with the actual fact of the event.
That worldwide overreaction mystified him. Surely they had not been that eager for Lord Confalume to go. They had loved Lord Confalume, who had been a great Coronal in his day, although everyone knew that Confalume’s day now was over and it was time for someone new and more dynamic to occupy the seat of kingly power, and that Prestimion was the right man. Even so, this outpouring of gifts upon the transfer of authority seemed almost as much an expression of relief as one of joy.
Relief over what? Prestimion wondered. What had triggered such a superfluity of jubilation, verging on worldwide hysteria?
A fierce civil war had lately come to a happy outcome. Were they rejoicing over that, perhaps?
No. No.
The citizens of Majipoor could not possibly know anything about the sequence of strange events—the conspiracy and the usurpation and the terrible war that followed it—that had brought Lord Prestimion by such a roundabout route to his throne. All of that had been obliterated from the world’s memory by Prestimion’s own command. So far as Majipoor’s billions of people were aware, the civil war had never happened. The brief illegitimate reign of the self-styled Coronal Lord Korsibar had vanished from memory as though it had never been. As the world understood things, Lord Confalume, upon the death of the old Pontifex Prankipin, had succeeded to Prankipin’s title, whereupon Prestimion had serenely and uneventfully been elevated to the Coronal’s throne, which Confalume had held for so long. So, then, why this furor? Why?
Along all four sides of the huge room the bewildering overabundance of gifts rose high, most of them still in their packing-cases, mountains of stacked treasure climbing toward the distant roof-timbers. Room after room of this rarely used northern wing of the Castle was filled with crates from far-off districts whose names meant little or nothing to Prestimion . Some of them were familiar to him only as notations on the map, others not known to him at all. New loads of cargo were arriving even now. The chamberlains of the Castle were at their wits’ end to deal with it all.
And what lay before him here was only a fraction of what had come in. There were the live gifts, too. The people of the provinces had sent an extraordinary assortment of animals, a whole zoo’s worth of them and then some, the most bizarre and fantastic beasts to be found on Majipoor. The Divine be thanked, they were being kept somewhere else. And strange plants as well, for the Coronal’s garden. Prestimion had seen some of those yesterday: some huge trees with foliage like swords of gleaming silver, and grotesque succulent things with twisted spiky leaves, and a couple of sinister carnivorous mouthplants from Zimroel, clanking their central jaws to show how horrendously eager they were to be fed, and a tub of dark porphyry filled with translucent gambeliavos from Stoienzar’s northern coast, that looked as if they were made of spun glass and gave off soft tinkling sighs when you passed your hand over them—and much more besides, botanical splendors beyond enumeration. All those too were elsewhere.