“Well—” Gialaurys began, but no names came to his lips.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Prestimion,” said Septach Melayn. “There may not be any Korsibar loyalists left around, but there isn’t anybody at the Castle, other than the three of us, who’s not seriously confused in some way by the witchery that you invoked at the end of the war. The war itself is wiped from everyone’s mind, yes. But they all know that something big happened. They just don’t know what it was. A lot of important men are dead, whole huge regions of Alhanroel are devastated, the Mavestoi Dam has mysteriously given way and flooded half a province, and yet everybody has been given to understand that there’s been a smooth and uneventful transition from Confalume’s reign to yours. It doesn’t add up right, and they know it. They keep running up against that big throbbing blank place in their memories. It bothers them. I see mystified looks coming over people’s faces right in the middle of a sentence, and they stop speaking and frown and press their hands against the sides of their heads as if they’re groping in their minds for something that isn’t there. I’ve begun to wonder if it was such a good idea to remove the war from history like that, Prestimion.”
This was a subject Prestimion would have preferred not to discuss. But there was no avoiding it now that Septach Melayn had wrestled it out into the open.
“The war was a terrible wound to the soul of the world,” said Prestimion tautly. “If I had left it unexpunged, grievances and countergrievances would have been popping up forever between Korsibar’s faction and mine. By having all memories of the war wiped clean, I gave everyone a chance to make a fresh start. To borrow one of your own favorite phrases, Septach Melayn, what’s done is done. We have to live now with the consequences, and we will, and that’s all there is to it.”
Inwardly, though, he was not so sure. He had heard disquieting reports—everyone had—of strange outbreaks of mental imbalance here and there on the Mount, people attacking strangers without motive in the streets, or bursting into uncontrollable sobbing that went on for days and days, or throwing themselves into rivers or off cliffs. Such tales had come in lately from Halanx and Minimool, and Haplior also, as though some whirling eddy of madness could be spiralling outward and downward from the Castle to the adjacent cities of the Mount. Even as far down the Mount as Stee, it seemed, there had been a serious incident, a housemaid in some rich man’s mansion who had leaped from a window and killed two people standing in the street below.
What reason was there, though, to link any of this to the general amnesia that he had had his sorcerers induce at the end of the war? Perhaps such things inevitably happened at the time of the changing of kings, especially after so long and happy a reign as that of Lord Confalume. People thought of Confalume as being a loving father to the entire world; they were unhappy, perhaps, to see him disappearing into the Labyrinth; and hence these disturbances. Perhaps.
Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were going on and on, extending into a host of new areas the already sufficient list of problems that were awaiting solutions:
He needed, they told him, to integrate the various magical arts, which had come to take on such importance on Majipoor in Confalume’s time, more fully into the fabric of society. This would require conversations with such folk as Gominik Halvor and Heszmon Gorse, who had remained at the Castle for just that purpose, said Gialaurys, rather than return to the wizards’ capital at Triggoin.
He needed also to do something about a horde of synthetically-created monsters that Korsibar had planned to use against him on the battlefield if the war had lasted just a little longer: according to Gialaurys, a number of them had escaped from their pens and were rampaging through some district north of Castle Mount.
Then, too, he ought to deal with some complaint that the Metamorphs of Zimroel had raised, having to do with the boundaries of the forest reservation on which they were required to live. The Shapeshifters were complaining of illegal encroachments on their domain by unscrupulous land-developers out of Ni-moya.
And also there was this to do, and this, and that—Prestimion was barely listening, now. They were so insufferably sincere, these two, Septach Melayn in his elegant knightly way, Gialaurys in his own blunter style. Septach Melayn had always posed as one who never took anything seriously, but it was, Prestimion knew, only a pose; and as for Gialaurys, he was nothing else but stolid seriousness, a great massive sturdy lump of it. Prestimion felt, more keenly than ever, the loss of the slippery little Duke Svor, who had had many faults but never the one of excessive sincerity. He had been the perfect mediator between the other two.
How idiotic it had been of Svor to step out onto the battlefield of Thegomar Edge, when his proper place had been behind the scenes, scheming and plotting! Svor had not been any sort of warrior. What lunacy had driven him to take part in that murderous battle? And now he was gone. Where, Prestimion wondered, will I find a replacement for him?
And for Thismet, also. Especially, especially, Thismet. The biting pain of that loss would not leave him, would not so much as diminish with the passing weeks. Was it Thismet’s death, he wondered, that had cast him into this miserable despondency?
Much work awaited him, yes. Too much, it sometimes seemed. Well, he would manage it somehow. Every Coronal in the long list of his predecessors had faced the same sense of immense responsibilities that had to be mastered, and each had shouldered those responsibilities and played his part, for good or ill, as history related—as history would one day relate also of him. And most of them had done the job reasonably well, all things considered.
But he could not shake off that mysterious, damnable sense of weariness, of hollowness, of letdown and dissatisfaction, that had poisoned his spirit since the first day of his reign. He had hoped that the taking up of his royal duties would cure him of that. It did not seem to be working out that way.
Very likely the tasks before him would seem far less immense, Prestimion thought, if only Thismet had lived. What a wonderful partner of his labors she would have been! A Coronal’s daughter herself, aware of the challenges of the kingship, and doubtless more than capable of handling many of them—Thismet would have been ever so much more capable of governing, he was sure, than her foolish brother: she would gladly have shared a great deal of his burden. But Thismet, too, was lost to him forever.
Still talking, Septach Melayn? And you, Gialaurys?
Prestimion toyed with the slim circlet of bright metal that lay before him on the desk. His “everyday” crown, as he liked to call it, to distinguish it from the exceedingly magnificent formal crown that Lord Confalume had had fashioned for himself, with those three immense many-faceted purple diniabas gleaming in its browband, and its finials of emeralds and rubies, and its inlaid chasings of seven different precious metals.
Confalume had loved to wear that crown; but Prestimion had worn it only once, in the first hours of his reign. He meant to reserve it henceforth for the very highest occasions of state. He found it mildly absurd even to have this little silver band around his head, hard though he had fought for the right to wear it. But he kept it constantly by him, all the same. He was Coronal of Majipoor, after all.