“I don’t know that either,” he said, hating himself for the cowardly evasion.
She was unrelenting. “There can’t be any doubt of it, can there? You’ve already been named Coronal-designate. The Coronal doesn’t ever change his mind and pick someone else, once he does that.—Please, Dekkeret, I want you to be honest with me.”
“I expect to be made Coronal when Confalume dies, yes. If Lord Prestimion asks me, that is, and the Council ratifies.”
“If you’re asked, you’ll accept?”
“Yes.”
“And what will happen to us, then?” Her voice came to him as though from a great distance.
He had no choice now but to go forward with this. “A Coronal should have a consort. I was discussing that very thing with the Lady Varaile last evening.”
“You make it sound so impersonal, Dekkeret. ‘A Coronal should have a consort.’ ” She seemed frightened at speaking to him so bluntly, he who soon would be king, and yet there was an angry edge to her tone all the same. “Does it happen that there’s anyone in particular whom you might select to be your consort, perhaps?”
“You know there is, Fulkari. But—”
“But?”
He said, “You’ve made it clear in a thousand ways that you don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”
“Have I?”
“Haven’t you? A minute ago you asked me if I’d accept the throne if it was offered to me. As though it was a fairly common thing for people to refuse to become Coronal, Fulkari. It was last month, I think, that you wanted to know, out of the blue, whether any Coronal-designate had ever turned it down. And before that, that time when you and I were in Amblemorn—”
“All right. That’s enough. You don’t need to dredge up any more things of that sort.” She appeared close to tears, and yet her voice was still steady. “I asked you to be honest with me. Now I’ll be just as honest with you.” Fulkari paused a moment. Then she said, regarding him evenly, “Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”
He nodded. “I know that. But if you don’t, why have you let yourself become the lover of the Coronal-designate? For the sake of excitement? Amusement? You knew, when we met, what Prestimion had in mind for me.”
“You speak as though these things happen by design. Did I come to the Castle expecting to fall in love with Coronal-designate Dekkeret? Did I pursue you in any way after I arrived? You saw me. You sought me out. We talked. We went riding together. We fell in love. I could just as easily ask you, why did the Coronal-designate choose as his lover a woman who doesn’t happen to think it’s such a wonderful thing to be the wife of the Coronal?”
“I didn’t realize that I had done any such thing. That was something I discovered only gradually, as we got to know each other. It’s troubled me tremendously ever since I figured it out.”
Her face was flushed with anger. “Because our little emotional entanglement stands in the way of your great ambition?”
“You can’t call becoming Coronal my ambition, Fulkari. I never asked for it. I never even imagined that it could be possible. It came to me by default, when an earlier logical heir unexpectedly died.” How could he make her understand? Why was it such a struggle? “No Coronal ever sets out to win the throne. If it doesn’t descend on him out of inevitable logic, he doesn’t merit it. For years, now, the logic has pointed to me.”
“And must you go along with that logic?”
He looked at her helplessly. “It would be shameful to refuse.”
“Shameful! Shameful! That’s all you men are concerned with—pride, shame, how things will look! You say you love me. You know how frightened I am of your becoming Coronal. And yet—because your pride won’t let you say no to Prestimion—”
Now she was weeping. Awkwardly he took her in his arms. She did not resist, but her body was stiff, withdrawn.
Quietly he said, “Explain to me why it is that you don’t want to be my consort, Fulkari.”
“A Coronal spends all his time reading official documents, signing decrees, going to meetings. Or else he’s traveling to some far-off place to attend banquets and make speeches. He has very little time for his wife. How often do you see Prestimion and Varaile together? The Coronal’s wife has banquets and functions to go to and speeches to make, too. It seems like a hideous dreary exhausting job. It would devour me. I’m only twenty-four years old, Dekkeret. I don’t feel anywhere close to ready to taking on a life like that.”
“Hush,” he said, as though soothing a child. That was how she seemed to him now, anyway: if not a child, then still adolescent, far from any real maturity. He saw now why Varaile was so troubled over the present state of his relationship with Fulkari. Varaile hoped that Fulkari would be Majipoor’s next royal consort, and was afraid that Dekkeret was on the verge of discarding her. But Varaile had no real understanding of the way things really stood.
Did he, though? Fulkari’s beauty, her eerie resemblance to Sithelle, had mesmerized him also into thinking that she had in her the material of a royal consort. But evidently she did not. A royal mistress, yes. But not a queen. She had been telling him that, indirectly at first and now quite explicitly, for a long time now. “Hush,” he said again, as her sobbing deepened. “It’s all right, Fulkari. The Pontifex may not be dying at all. He may go on living for years—years—”
He was saying things now that he did not believe in the slightest. But it seemed more important to comfort her, just then, than to try to address the realities of the situation.
For the realities of the situation were that he would become Coronal and that he could not marry Fulkari, who plainly did not want to be a Coronal’s wife; and so he had no choice but to break with her forever, here and now. But that was something he did not think he could bring himself to do. Certainly not today; perhaps not ever. It was an impossible situation.
He held her close. He stroked her tenderly. Gradually the sobbing ceased. The stiffness of her stance began to ease.
Then, by an almost imperceptible transition, they found themselves with a single accord passing from anguish and confusion and unreconcilable conflict to the rhythms of desire and need. This was their special place, where they had often come to escape from the bustling intrusiveness of Castle life; and here beside the sweet dark pond the granths had built under the close-woven hakkatingas, a sudden familiar urgency once more overcame them and thrust all other considerations aside.
Fulkari, as ever, took the lead. She kissed him lightly and moved a short way back from him. Touched her hand to the metal clasps of her garment at breast, hip, and thigh. The soft leather gave way as though sliced by an invisible blade. She stepped quickly free of it and stood radiantly bare before him, pale, slender, smiling, irresistible, holding out her hands to him. Her eyes, those gray-violet Sithelle eyes of hers, were shining. They beckoned to him. For Dekkeret there was magic in that bright gleam. Sorcery.
At that moment the issue of who would or would not be the consort of the next Coronal of Majipoor seemed as far away to him, and as unimportant, as the sandy desert wastes of Suvrael. He could not think of such things now. He was helpless against the magic of her beauty. That smile, the sight of her slim naked form, the glow of those marvelous eyes, brought back to blazing life all that had caught him and gripped him again and again these three years past. He reached for her and pulled her lightly toward him, and they sank down together, intertwined, on the carpet of bubblemoss beside the pond.
15
“Today, I think, is our day for the singlestick baton,” said Septach Melayn a little doubtfully. “Or is it the basket-hilt saber we do today?”