Coronal of Majipoor.
He had set his goal high, and after terrible struggle he had attained it.
As his two dearest friends droned on and on with their seemingly unending recitation of the tasks that awaited him and their interminable discussion of priorities and strategies, Prestimion was no longer even pretending to be paying attention. He knew what his tasks were: all of these, yes, and one that Septach Melayn and Gialaurys had not mentioned. For above all else he must make himself, here at the outset, the master of the officials and courtiers who were the real heart of the government: he must demonstrate his kingliness to them, he must show them that Lord Confalume, with the guidance of the Divine, had chosen the right man for the post.
Which meant that he must think like a Coronal, live like a Coronal, walk like a Coronal, breathe like a Coronal. That was the prime task; and all else would follow inevitably from the doing of it.
Very well, Prestimion: you are Coronal. Be Coronal.
The husk of him remained where it was, behind his desk, pretending to listen as Septach Melayn and Gialaurys earnestly laid out an agenda for the early months of his reign. But his soul flew upward and outward, into the cool open sky above the tip of Castle Mount, and journeyed toward the world, traveling in miraculous simultaneity to all directions of the compass.
He opened himself now to Majipoor and let himself feel its immensity flowing through him. Sent his mind roving outward across the vastness of the world that in these days just past had been entrusted to his care.
He must embrace that vastness fully, he knew, take it into himself, encompass it with his soul.
—The three great continents, sprawling, vast, many-citied Alhanroel and gigantic lush-forested Zimroel and the smaller continent of Suvrael, that sun-blasted land down in the torrid south. The giant surging rivers. The countless species of trees and plants and beasts and birds that filled the world with such beauty and wonder. The blue-green expanse of the Inner Sea with its roving herds of great sea-dragons moving unhurriedly about their mysterious migrations, and the holy Isle of Sleep that lay in its center. The other ocean, the enormous unexplored Great Sea that stretched across the unknown farther hemisphere of the world.
—The marvelous cities, the fifty great ones of the Mount and the uncountable multitude beyond, Sippulgar and Se-farad and Alaisor and wizardly Triggoin, Kikil and Mai and Kimoise, Pivrarch and Lontano, Da and Demigon Glade, and on and on, across to the far shore of the Inner Sea and the distant continent of Zimroel with its multiplicity of ever-burgeoning megalopolises, Ni-moya, Narabal, Til-omon, Pi-druid, Dulorn, Sempernond, and all the rest.
—The billions and billions of people, not only the humans but those of the other races, Vroons and Skandars, Su-Suheris and Hjorts and the humble slow-witted Liimen, and also the mysterious shape-shifting Metamorphs, whose world this had been in its entirety until it was taken from them so many thousands of years ago.
All of it now placed in his hands.
His.
His.
The hands of Prestimion of Muldemar, yes: who now was Coronal of Majipoor.
Suddenly Prestimion found himself feverishly yearning to go forth not merely in a vision but in the flesh, and explore this world that had been given into his charge. To see it all; to be everywhere at once, drinking in the infinite wonders of Majipoor. Out of the pain and loneliness of his strange new life as Coronal came, in one great turbulent rush, the passionate desire to visit the lands from which those coronation gifts had come. To repay the givers, in a sense, with the gift of himself.
A king must know his kingdom at first hand. Until the time of the civil war, when he had trekked back and forth across Alhanroel from one battlefield to another, his life had been centered almost entirely on Castle Mount, and at the Castle itself. He had been to some of the Fifty Cities, of course; and there had been the one journey to the eastern coast of Zimroel when he was hardly out of boyhood, that time when he had met and fallen into friendship with Gialaurys at Piliplok, but otherwise he had seen little of the world.
The war, though, had given Prestimion an appetite for traveling. It had taken him up and down the heartland of Alhanroel, to cities and places he had never expected to see: he had beheld the astonishing might of the Gulikap Fountain, that uncheckable spume of pure energy, and had crossed the forbidding spine of the Trikkala Mountains into the lovely agricultural zones on the other side, and had impelled himself across the grim dread desert of the Valmambra to reach the remote city of the wizards, Triggoin, far in the north. And yet he had seen only a tiny sliver of the magnificence that was Majipoor.
He longed, abruptly, to experience more. He had not realized, until this moment, how powerful that longing was. The desire seized him and took full possession of him. How much longer could he remain holed up in isolated majesty in the luxurious confines of the Castle, drearily passing one day after another in such matters as interviewing potential members of the Council and reviewing the legislative program that he had been handed by Lord Confalume’s administration, when the whole glorious world beyond these walls beckoned to him, urging him to go forth into it? If he could not have Thismet, well, he would have Majipoor itself to console him for the loss. To see all that it held, to touch, to taste, to smell. To drink deep; to devour. To present himself to his subjects, saying, Look, see, here I am before you, Prestimion your king!
“Enough,” he said suddenly, glancing up and interrupting Septach Melayn in full spate. “If you will, my friends, spare me the rest of it for now.”
Septach Melayn peered down at him from his great height. “Are you all right, Prestimion? You look very strange, suddenly.”
“Strange?”
“Tense. Strained.”
Indifferently Prestimion said, “I’ve slept badly these few nights past.”
“That comes of sleeping alone, my lord,” said Septach Melayn, with a wink and a little sniggering leer.
“No doubt that’s so,” said Prestimion icily. “Another problem to be solved, at another time.” He allowed Septach Melayn to see plainly that he was not amused. Then he said, after a long chilly moment of silence, “The true problem, Septach Melayn, is that I feel a great restlessness churning within me. I’ve felt it since the hour this crown first touched my forehead. The Castle has begun to seem like a prison to me.”
Septach Melayn and Gialaurys exchanged troubled glances.
“Is that so, my lord?” said Septach Melayn cautiously.
“Very much so.”
“You should talk to Dantirya Sambail about what being a prisoner is really like,” Septach Melayn said, giving Prestimion an exaggerated roll of his eyes.
The man is irrepressible, Prestimion thought.
“In due time I will certainly do just that,” he replied unsmilingly. “But I remind you that Dantirya Sambail’s a criminal. I’m a king.”
“Who dwells in the greatest of all castles,” said Gialaurys. “Would you rather be back on the battlefield then, my lord? Sleeping in the rain beneath a bower of vakumba-trees in Moorwath forest? Struggling in the mud by the banks of the Jhelum? Making your way through the swamps of Beldak marsh? Or wandering about deliriously in the desert of Valmambra once more, perhaps?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Gialaurys. You don’t understand what I’m saying. Neither of you do. Is this the Labyrinth, and I the Pontifex, that I’m required to stay in one place forever and ever? The Castle’s not the boundary of my life. These few years past all my efforts have been spent on making myself Coronal; and now I am; and it seems to me now that all I’ve achieved for myself is to make myself the king of documents and meetings. The coronation festivities have come and gone. I sit in this office, grand as it is, day after day, yearning with all my heart to be anywhere else.—My friends, I need to get out into the world for a time.”