Simmilgord looked forward to a time when the thesis on Dvorn that he planned to write, fall of unanswered questions though it was likely to be, would win him admission to the archival centers of Majipoor’s two capitals, the Pontifical one in the Labyrinth and the grand sprawling one at the Castle of the Coronal, where he could delve into the ancient secrets of those early days. But for one reason and another that time never seemed to arrive. He took his degree, and wrote his thesis—painfully, pitifully short on hard information—and got his doctorate, and he was taken on as a lecturer at the University with the hope of a professorship somewhere in the future, and he published a few papers—somewhat speculative in nature—on the founding of the Pontificate, and won the admiration of a handful of other historians thereby.
But that was all. The romance, the fantasy, that he had thought his life as a scholar would provide never seemed to materialize. He had reached the age of twenty-five, an age when one’s life seems to be settling into its permanent pattern, and that pattern was not an inspiring one.
He began to think that he was going to spend the rest of his days in ghastly Sisivondal, delivering the same lectures year after year to ever-changing audiences of uninterested undergraduates and writing papers that recapitulated existing knowledge or invented shaky new theories about that which was unknown. That was not the vision he had had when he had climbed those little upjutting hillocks in the Vale of Gloyn and pretended he could take in the whole continent from Alaisor to the shores of the Great Sea in a single sweeping view.
And then the chairman of his department called him and said,”We would hate to lose you, Simmilgord, but I have a query here from the city of Kesmakuran—you know the place, surely? Just a piffling little agricultural town, but one of the oldest in Alhanroel. The alleged birthplace of the Pontifex Dvorn. Thought to be the site of his tomb as well, I think.”
“I know it well, yes,” said Simmilgord. “Two years ago and again last year I applied for a research grant to do some work there, but so far—”
“We have more than a research grant for you, I’m glad to say. The city fathers of Kesmakuran have decided to freshen up Dvorn’s burial site, and they’re looking for a curator. They’ve read your work on Dvorn and they think you’re just the man. Clean the place up a little, establish a small museum nearby, turn Kesmakuran into something of a destination for tourists. It’s an extremely old place, you know—older than Alaisor, older than Stoien, older than half the cities on Castle Mount, and they’re very proud of that. There’s enough in their budget to let you have an archaeologist to assist you, too, and I know that you and Lutiel Vengifrons are great friends, so we thought of recommending the two of you as a team—if you’re interested, that is—”
“Curator of the tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn!” Simmilgord said in wonder. “Am I interested? Am I?”
Lutiel Vengifrons said, “It’s a little bit of a career detour for us, don’t you think?” As usual, there was a bit of an adversarial edge in his tone. The friendship that held Simmilgord and Lutiel together was based on an attraction of opposites, Simmilgord a tall, thin, flimsily built man of mercurial temperament, Lutiel short and strong, wide-shouldered, barrel-chested, cautious and stolid by nature.
“A detour? No, I don’t think so,” Simmilgord replied. “It puts me right where I want to be. How can I claim to be an expert on the reign of Dvorn when I haven’t even visited the city where he was born and where he’s supposed to be buried? But I could never afford to make the trip, and that research grant always seemed to be dangling just out of reach—and now, to live right there, to have daily access to all the important sites of his life—”
“And to turn them into tourist attractions?”
“Are you saying you don’t want to go with me?” Simmilgord asked.
“No—no, I didn’t say that. Not exactly. But still I can’t help wondering whether two earnest young scholars really ought to let themselves get involved with any such scheme. ‘Clean the place up a little,’ the chairman said. What does that mean? Deck it out with marble and onyx? Make it into some kind of gaudy amusement-park thing?”
“Maybe have a little modern plumbing put in, at most,” said Simmilgord. “And some decent lighting. Look, Lutiel, it’s a brilliant opportunity. Maybe you worry too much about being an earnest young scholar, do you know what I mean? What an earnest young scholar like you needs to do is go to Kesmakuran and dig around a little and uncover a bunch of astounding artifacts that bring Dvorn out of the realm of culture-hero myths and turn him into a real person. And here’s your chance to do it. Why, right now we don’t even know that he ever existed, and—”
Lutiel Vengifrons gasped. “Can you seriously mean a thing like that, Simmilgord? He had to exist. Somebody had to be the first Pontifex.”
“Somebody, yes. But that’s all we can say. About the actual Dvorn we know practically nothing. He’s just a name. His life is an absolute mystery to us. For all we know, Furvain might have made him up out of whole cloth because he needed a vivid character to fill out that part of his poem. But now—well—”
Simmilgord paused, startled and baffled by what he had just heard himself saying.
Never before had he expressed doubts about the real existence of Dvorn. And in fact he felt none. That Aithin Furvain’s famous poem of four thousand years ago was the chief source of information about Dvorn, and that Furvain had not been any sort of scholar, but simply the wastrel son of Lord Sangamor, an idler, something of a fool, a poet, practically a myth himself, was irrelevant. Furvain must have had some concrete source to work from. There was no reason to take his cunningly constructed verses as a work of literal history, but no reason to discard them entirely as poetic fabrications, either. And there was no arguing away the fact that the Pontificate had been founded, after all, that some charismatic leader had put the whole thing into shape and persuaded the squabbling peoples of Majipoor to unite behind him, and if that leader had not been the Dvorn of Furvain’s poem he must have been someone very much like him, whose existence could very likely be proven by the proper sort of archaeological and historical research.
So in raising an argument that cast doubts on Dvorn’s literal existence, Simmilgord realized, he was simply taking an extreme position for the sake of overcoming Lutiel’s doubts about their taking the job. What he yearned for, above all else, was to get out of dusty, parched Sisivondal, away from the endless paper-shuffling and bureaucratic nonsense of university life, and plunge into some genuine historical research. And he very much wanted Lutiel to accompany him, because there definitely would be some excavating to do at the tomb site and he was no archaeologist, and Lutiel was. They would make a good team out there in Kesmakuran. But suggesting that in the present state of knowledge no one could even be sure that Dvorn had ever existed was to overstate the case. Of course Dvorn had existed.
That much they could take for granted. It would be their job to discover what he really had been like and how he had achieved what he had achieved. And what an exciting task it would be! To dig deep into the world’s remote, almost mythical past—to make direct contact with the stuff of fantasy and romance—!