“And your Dinitak? Can he? He’s a Barjazid, I remind you.”
“Of the same blood,” said Dekkeret, “but not of the same nature. I saw that in Suvrael, when he urged his father Venghenar to go with me to the Castle and show you the first helmet. Later we saw that again when he came to us at Stoien, bringing a helmet we could use against his father in the rebellion. You were suspicious of him then, do you remember? You said, ‘How can we trust him?’ when he showed up bearing the helmet. You thought it might be all some intricate new scheme of Dantirya Sambail’s. ‘Trust him, my lord,’ is what I said to you then. ‘Trust him!’ And you did. Were we wrong?”
“Not then,” Prestimion said.
“Nor will we be now. He is my closest friend, Prestimion. I know him as I’ve never known anyone else. He’s driven by a set of moral beliefs that make the rest of us seem like pickpockets. You said it yourself at Muldemar, remember, that time when he gave you an answer that was truthful, but a little too blunt? ‘You are no diplomat, Dinitak, but you are an honest man,’ or words to that effect.—Did you notice that although he came with me on this trip, Keltryn didn’t?”
“Keltryn?”
“Fulkari’s younger sister. She and Dinitak have had a little romance—but why would you know that, Prestimion? You were off at the Labyrinth when it started. Anyway, he wouldn’t take Keltryn with him. Said it was improper to be traveling with an unmarried woman. Improper! When did you last hear a word like that?”
“A very holy young man, I agree. Too holy, perhaps.”
“Better that than otherwise. We’ll marry him off to Keltryn sooner or later—if she’ll have him, that is; Fulkari tells me she’s furious with him for leaving her behind—and they’ll begin a tribe of holy young Barjazids who can succeed their great ancestor as Kings of Dreams in the centuries ahead. And fear of the harsh dreams that the King of Dreams can send will maintain peace in the land forever after.”
“A nice fantasy, isn’t it? But it makes me very uneasy, Dekkeret. I once took it upon myself to meddle with the minds of everyone on Majipoor in one great swoop, at Thegomar Edge, when I had my mages wipe out all memory of the Korsibar uprising. I thought then it was a good thing to do, but I was wrong, and I paid a bitter price for it. Now you propose a new kind of mind-meddling, a constant ongoing monitoring.—I won’t allow it, Dekkeret, and that ends it. You would need to have the approval of the Pontifex to establish any such system, and that approval is herewith withheld. Now, if we can return to the problem of Mandralisca—”
“You doom us all to chaos, Prestimion.”
“Do I, now?”
“The world has become too complicated to be governed from the Labyrinth and the Castle any longer. Zimroel has grown wealthy and restless under Prankipin and Confalume and you. And they know how long it takes to ship troops from Alhanroel to deal with any sort of trouble there. The rise of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail as a sort of quasi-king in Zimroel was the beginning of a secessionist movement there. Now it’s gone another step. There’ll be the constant threat of divisiveness and insurrection across the sea unless we have some direct and immediate way of intervening. The whole structure will come apart.”
“And you actually think that using the Barjazid helmet is the only way we have of holding the world government together?”
“I do. The only way short of turning Zimroel into an armed camp with imperial garrisons stationed in every city, that is. Do you think that would be better? Do you, Prestimion?”
Abruptly Prestimion rose and went to the window. He yearned for nothing more than to bring this maddening discussion to an end. Why would Dekkeret not yield, even in the face of a Pontifical refusal? Why would he not see the impossibility of his great idea?
Or am I, Prestimion wondered, the one who refuses to see?
For a long time he stared out silently into the streets of Stoien city. He remembered a time when he had stared out another window of this very building at pillars of smoke rising from the fires set by lunatics at the time of the plague of madness, a plague that he had, however indirectly he had done it, brought upon the world himself.
Did he, he asked himself, want to see fires such as those in the cities of Majipoor again? In Zimroeclass="underline" in wondrous Ni-moya, and magical crystalline Dulorn, and tropic Narabal of the sweet sea breezes? You doom us all to chaos, Prestimion—A fourth Power of the Realm. A King of Dreams.
Young Barjazid wearing the helmet, roving the night to seek out those who threatened to break the peace, and warning them sternly of the consequences, and punishing them if they disobeyed. Of the same blood but not of the same nature—It would be a mighty transformation. Did he dare? How much less risky it would be simply to apply the Pontifical veto to this wild scheme and put it away, and send Dekkeret off to Zimroel to crush this new uprising and hurl Mandralisca finally into his grave. While he himself returned to the Labyrinth and lived out the rest of his days pleasantly there amid imperial pomp and ceremony, as Confalume had done for so long, never needing to grapple with the hard questions of governance, for he had a Coronal who could grapple with such things for him.
A constant threat of divisiveness and insurrection across the sea. The whole structure will come apart—
From somewhere behind him Dekkeret said, “I want to point out, your majesty, that we have that vision of Maundigand-Klimd’s to take into account here. And also, on my journey here across Alhanroel, there were several occasions when I had visionary experiences of my own, to my great surprise, that seemed to indicate—”
“Hush,” Prestimion said softly, without turning. “You know what I think of visions and oracles and thaumaturgy and all the rest of that. Be quiet and let me think, Dekkeret. I pray you, man, just let me think.” A King of Dreams. A King of Dreams. A King of Dreams. And finally he said, “The first step, I think, is to speak with Dinitak. Send him to me, Dekkeret. The powers you want to entrust to him are greater even than our own, do you realize that? You say we can trust him, and very likely you’re right, but I can’t act just on your say-so. I suspect that I need to find out just how holy he is. What if he’s too holy, eh? What if he thinks that even you and I are miserable sinners who need to be brought in check? What would we be loosing on the world, in that case? Send him to me for a little chat.”
“Now, you mean?” Dekkeret asked.
“Now.”
15
“The plan is this,” Dekkeret told Fulkari, two hours later. “We are to call it simply a grand processional. It won’t be labeled in any way as a military expedition. But it’ll be a grand processional that looks a lot like a military expedition. The Coronal will be accompanied not only by his own guardsmen, but by a contingent of Pontifical troops—a substantial number of Pontifical troops. Which gives the whole enterprise something of the aspect of a peacekeeping mission, since a grand processional would normally involve Castle personnel only, and the forces of the Pontifex would have no role in it. The message we’ll be sending, then, is this: ‘Here is your new Coronal, and hail him as your king. But if anyone among you has treasonous thoughts of insurrection, you are warned that there is an army standing here behind him that will bring you to your senses.’ ”