But as they made their way through the innumerable drafty winding passages and corridors of the Castle’s northern wing, Prestimion found himself sliding back into bleakness. The task of regaining his poise was proving harder than he had expected. That dark shroud clung to him relentlessly.
He should have risen to the Coronal’s throne without difficulties. He had been the unquestioned choice of his predecessor, Lord Confalume. It was understood by all that the crown would be his when the old Pontifex, Prankipin, died, and Lord Confalume moved on to the Labyrinth to take up Prankipin’s post of senior monarch. But when Prankipin did eventually die, it was Korsibar, Lord Confalume’s impressive-looking but slow-witted son, who had seized the royal power, at the urging of his pack of sinister companions and with the aid of an equally sinister magus. It was unlawful for a Coronal’s son to succeed his father on the throne, and so there had been civil war, from which Prestimion emerged in time in possession of his rightful crown.
But such unnecessary destruction—so many lives lost—such a scar slashed across Majipoor’s long and peaceful history—
Prestimion had healed that scar, so he hoped, by decreeing the radical act of obliteration by which a phalanx of sorcerers had wiped all recollection of the war from the minds of everyone in the world. Everyone, that was, other than he and his two surviving companions-at-arms, Gialaurys and Septach Melayn.
But one scar would not heal, nor could he ever obliterate it. That was from the wound he had suffered at the climactic moment of the final battle. A wound to the heart, it was: the murder of the rebel Korsibar’s twin sister, the Lady Thismet, the great love of Prestimion’s life, at the hands of the sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon. No magic would bring Thismet back, and none would replace her in Prestimion’s affections. There was only a void where their love had been. What had it profited him to be made Coronal, if in the attaining of the throne he had lost the person who mattered most to him?
Prestimion and Septach Melayn were at the entrance now to the courtyard that led to Lord Thraym’s Tower, where most Coronals of modern times had had their private apartments. Septach Melayn paused there and said, “Shall I leave you here, Prestimion? Or do you want me to remain with you while you prepare yourself for the banquet?”
“You’ll need to change your outfit also, Septach Melayn. Go. I’ll be all right.”
“Will you, now?”
“I will. My word on that, Septach Melayn.”
Prestimion went inside. The grand apartments that were his official residence now were mostly still bare. Lord Confalume, he who was Confalume Pontifex now, had shipped his incomparable collection of rarities and wonders off to his new residence in the depths of the Labyrinth. During the time of his usurpation Korsibar had furnished these rooms to his own taste—a host of highly ordinary things, some flashy and vulgar, some drab and common, all of them un-interesting—but the same act of sorcery that had wiped Korsibar’s illicit reign from the world’s memory had cleared away all of Korsibar’s possessions. Korsibar had never existed, now. He had been deleted retroactively from existence. In due time Prestimion would have some of his own things transferred to the Castle from his family estate at Muldemar, but he scarcely had had the opportunity yet for thinking about that, and he had little about him now except some furnishings brought over from the lesser apartment that he had occupied in former times in the Castle’s eastern wing, where high princes of the realm were allotted residential quarters.
Nilgir Sumanand, the gray-bearded man who had long been Prestimion’s aide-de-camp, was waiting for him, fretting in obvious impatience. “The coronation banquet, lordship—”
“Yes. Yes, I know. I’ll bathe quickly. As for what I’ll wear tonight, you probably already have it waiting, right? The green velvet banqueting robe, the golden stole, the star-burst brooch that I wore this afternoon, and the lighter crown, not the big formal one.”
“All is ready for you, my lord.”
A ceremonial guard of high lords of the realm escorted him to the banquet hall. The two senior peers led the way—Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, the outgoing High Counsellor, and the immensely wealthy prince Serithorn of Samivole—and the pompous Prince Gonivaul of Bombifale, the Grand Admiral of Majipoor, marched just behind them. These three had thrown their considerable influence to Korsibar at the time of the civil war; but they no longer were aware of that, and Prestimion felt that it would be useful for him to forgive them for their disloyalty, now that it had been rendered null anyway, and treat them with the respect that was owing to men of their positions and power.
Septach Melayn flanked Prestimion on his right and the hulking mountainous warrior Gialaurys was on his left. To the new Coronal’s rear walked his two surviving younger brothers, the hotheaded young Teotas and the tall, vehement Abrigant. The cunning and thoughtful third brother, Taradath, had perished in the war at the disastrous battle of the Iyann Valley, when Korsibar’s men had breached Mavestoi Dam and buried thousands of Prestimion’s troops under a wall of water.
The coronation banquet, as ever, was being held in the Grand Festival Hall in the Tharamond wing of the Castle. That was a room bigger even than the Hendighail Hall, and much more centrally located; but even so huge a space as that was incapable of holding all the invited guests, the princes and dukes and counts of so many hundreds of cities, and the mayors of those cities as well, and the miscellaneous nobility of Castle Mount, descendants of scores of Coronals and Pontifexes of years gone by. But Lord Tharamond, one of the most cunning builders among the many Coronals who had left their imprint on the Castle, had so designed things that his great hall led to a chain of others, five, eight, ten lesser feasting-halls in a row, whose connecting doors could be opened to make a single linked chamber of truly Majipoorian size; and in these, room after room after room, the attendees of the coronation banquet were distributed according to carefully measured weightings of rank and protocol.
Prestimion had little liking for such inflated events as these. He was a straightforward and unpretentious man, practical and efficient, with no special desire for self-aggrandizement. But he understood the proprieties very clearly. The world expected a great coronation festival from him; and so there would be one, the formal ceremony of crowning this afternoon, and now the great banquet, and tomorrow the speech to the assembled provincial governors, and the day after that the traditional coronation games, the jousting and the wrestling and the archery and all the rest of that. After which Prestimion’s coronation festival would end, and the heavy task of governing the giant world of Majipoor would begin.
The banquet seemed to last ten thousand years.
Prestimion greeted and embraced old Confalume and led him to his seat of honor at the dais. Confalume was still a sturdy and stalwart man even here in the eighth decade of his life, but much diminished in vigor and alertness from the heroic Confalume of old. He had lost both his son and his daughter in the civil war. Of course he had no notion of that, or even that Korsibar and Thismet had ever existed at all; but some sense of a vacancy in his spirit, an absence of something that should have been there, seemed evident in the often muddled expression of his eyes in these latter days.
Did he ever suspect the truth? Prestimion wondered. Did any of them? Was there ever a moment when someone, be he a high lord of the realm or a humble farmer, stumbled by happenstance across some outcropping of the hidden reality that underlay the false memories implanted in his mind, and came up frowning in bewilderment? If so, no one gave any indication of it. And probably never would. But even if the sorcery that had altered the history of Majipoor might not hold true in every last case, it was the sort of thing that one would think wisest to keep concealed, Prestimion supposed, for fear of being thought a madman. He profoundly hoped so, at any rate.