6
“And the new Coronal,” Dekkeret said. “What do you think of him, now?”
“What is there to think?” his cousin Sithelle replied. “He’s young, is all I know. And quite intelligent, I hear. We’ll find out the rest as time goes along.—They do say that he’s very short, I understand.”
“As if that matters,” said Dekkeret scornfully. “But I suppose it does, at least to you. He’d never marry you, would he? You’d be much too tall for him, and that wouldn’t do.”
They were walking along the broad rim of the immense impregnable wall of black stone monoliths that surrounded their home city of Normork, which was one of the twelve Slope Cities of the Mount, a long way down the giant mountain from Lord Prestimion and his Castle. Dekkeret was not quite eighteen, tall and strapping, with a powerful broad-shouldered frame and an air of strength and confidence about him. Sithelle, two years younger, was nearly of a height with him, though of a lithe and willowy build that made her seem almost fragile beside her sturdy cousin.
She laughed, a silvery, tinkling sound. “Me, marry the Coronal? Do you suppose any such thing has ever entered my mind?”
“Of course I do. Every girl on Majipoor is thinking the same thing these days. ‘Lord Prestimion is young and handsome and single, and he’ll be taking a consort sooner or later, and why not a girl like me?’ Am I right, Sithelle? No. No, of course not. I’m always wrong. And you’d never admit that you were interested in him if it was so, would you?”
“What are you saying? Coronals don’t marry commoners!” She slipped her arm through his. “You’re being silly,” she said. “As usual, Dekkeret.”
He and Sithelle were the best of friends. That was the problem. Their families had always hoped that they would marry some day; but they had grown up together, and looked upon each other almost as brother and sister. She was a handsome girl, too, with long springy hair the color of fire and bright, mischievous gray-violet eyes. But Dekkeret knew that he was no more likely ever to marry Sithelle than—well, than Sithelle was to marry Lord Prestimion. Less likely, indeed, because it was at least conceivable that she would somehow meet and marry the Coronal, but Dekkeret knew that Sithelle could never be his own choice as a wife.
They strolled along in silence for a time. The wall’s rim was so wide that ten people could walk abreast on the road that ran along it, but there were few others up there now. The hour was getting late, the hour of long shadows. The green-gold orb of the sun was low in the sky and in just a short while it would move around behind the tremendous upjutting mass of Castle Mount and be lost to their view.
“Look there,” Dekkeret said. He pointed downward into the city. They were at the place where the wall, as it followed the craggy contours of the Mount, made a great curve outward to carry past an out-thrusting rocky spur. The ancient palace of the Counts of Normork was tucked into that sweeping bulge.
A low, squat, almost windowless square building of gray basalt, it was, topped by six menacing-looking minarets. It seemed more like a fortress than a palace. Everything in Normork had that look—secure, inward-looking, well guarded—as though the city’s builders had looked upon the likelihood of invasion from some neighboring city as a perpetual threat. The outer wall, Normork’s most famous landmark, enclosed the city like a tortoise’s shell. It was so great a wall that it might almost be fair to call Normork itself an appendage to the wall, rather than speaking of the wall as an aspect of the city.
There was just one gate in the wall that so supremely enfolded Normork, and that was a mingy little thing that since time immemorial had been sealed tight every evening, so that if you didn’t enter the city before dark, you waited until morning. Normork’s wall, so it was said, was patterned after the great one of huge stone blocks, now mostly in ruins, that once had protected the prehistoric Metamorph capital of Velalisier. But thousands of years had gone by since there last had been war on Majipoor. Who were the enemies, Dekkeret often wondered, against whom this colossal rampart had been erected?
“The palace, you mean?” Sithelle said. “What about it?”
Long yellow streamers were draped across the palace’s featureless face. “They’ve still got the mourning badges hanging from the facade,” said Dekkeret.
“Well, why shouldn’t they? It isn’t all that long since the Count and his brother died.”
“It seems like a long time to me. Months.”
“No. Just a few weeks, in fact. I know, it does seem much longer. But it’s not.”
“How strange,” Dekkeret said. “That the two of them should be dead so young.” A boating accident on Lake Roghoiz, so it had been announced, where the princes had been sport-fishing. “Can it be true that the thing really happened the way we were told it did?”
Sithelle gave him a mystified look. “Is there any reason to doubt it? The nobility get killed in fishing and hunting accidents all the time.”
“We are asked to accept that Count Iram hooked a scamminaup so big that it pulled him right into the lake and drowned him. That scamminaup must have been as big as a sea-dragon, Sithelle! I can’t help wondering why he didn’t simply let go of the line. And then Lamiran going in after him to rescue him, and drowning also? It’s all very hard to believe.”
Sithelle said, shrugging, “What purpose would anyone have in lying about it? And what difference would it make? They’re dead, aren’t they, and Meglis is Count of Normork, and that’s that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. Odd, though.”
“What is?”
“So many deaths all about the same time. Significant deaths, dukes and earls and counts. But plenty of ordinary people too. My father travels pretty widely up and down the Mount on business, you know. Bibiroon, Stee, Banglecode, Minimool, all sorts of places. And he tells me that wherever you go, you see the mourning badges hanging from important public buildings and private residences. A lot of people have died recently. A lot. That’s hard to explain.”
“I suppose,” Sithelle said. She didn’t seem very interested.
Dekkeret persisted. “It bothers me. A lot of things do, lately. It’s all been something of a blur, these last weeks, wouldn’t you say? Not just the death of the Count and his brother. The old Pontifex dying too, Lord Confalume taking his place, Prestimion becoming Coronal. Everything seemed to happen so fast.”
“Things weren’t happening fast while his majesty was dying. That seemed to take forever.”
“But once he did die—whiz, bang, all manner of things going on at once, Prankipin’s funeral one week and Lord Prestimion’s coronation practically the next—”
“I don’t think they were actually so close together,” said Sithelle.
“Maybe not. But it seemed that way to me.”
They were beyond the palace, now, coming around to the side of the city that faced outward from the flank of the Mount, affording a glimpse of nearby Morvole on its thrusting promontory. A watchtower set into the wall provided a viewing-point here from which one could see, to the left, the highway winding down through the serrated rocky spine of Normork Crest into the foothills of the Mount, and in the other direction, looking upward, the cities of the next ring. There was even the merest shadowy hint, impossibly high above, of the lofty circlet of perpetual mist that cloaked the upper zones of the great mountain, hiding the summit and its Castle from the eyes of those below.