Just as he began to move the long rod about, a curious sensation at the back of his skull started to afflict him.
It was a very odd thing. It was somewhat like an itch, though not quite. He felt a mild warmth back there, and then something not so mild. A sharp stinging pain, then, as if some disagreeable insect were attacking him. But when he brushed the back of his head with his free hand he detected nothing.
He continued to prod the soil beneath the khemibors with his energy-thrower. The stinging sensation grew more intense. It became a fierce burning feeling now, highly localized—like a hot beam of light focused on a single point of his head, drilling, trying to cut its way through—
“Theriax?” he said, lurching, nearly falling.
“Uncle? Are you all right?”
The boy reached out to steady him. Dumafice Moal shrugged him away. He was beginning to feel a different sort of pain: an inward one, a bewildering distress that he could only describe to himself as a pain of the soul. A sense of his own inadequacy, of having performed his lifelong tasks poorly, of having failed the garden.
How odd, he thought. I always worked so hard.
But there was no hiding from the feeling of shame that now was pervading every corner of his spirit. It engulfed him entirely; he was sinking into it as into a dark deep pit, an abyss of guilt.
“Uncle?” the boy said, from very far away. “Uncle, I think you may be burning the—”
“Hush. Let me be.”
He saw only too clearly how poorly he had done his work. The garden was hopelessly infested with ravenous enemies. Pests of all sorts lurked everywhere: blights, molds, rusts, murrains, chewing creatures, sucking creatures, chafing creatures, burrowing creatures, biting creatures. Swarms of flies, clouds of gnats, armies of beetles, legions of worms. The thunderous sound of a billion tiny jaws chomping at once roared in his ears. Wherever he looked he saw more of them, and even more on the way: eggs, cocoons, nests, preparing to release new predators by the millions. And all of it his fault—his—his—
They all must burn.
“Uncle?”
Burn! Burn!
Dumafice Moal turned the energy-thrower to a higher level, and a higher one still. A dull rosy glow sprang up in the bed of khemibors. Burn! Let the himmis-bugs cope with that! He went quickly from row to row, from bed to bed, from terrace to terrace. Spirals of greasy blue smoke began to rise from newly created heaps of ash. The trunks of trees were turning black with the scars of combustion. Vines hung in angular, disheveled loops.
There was much to do. It was his duty to purify the garden, all of it, here and now. He would work at it all day, and far into the night if necessary, and onward to the following dawn. How else could he cope with the unbearable burden of guilt that roiled the deepest recesses of his soul?
He moved on and on, torching this, blasting that. Clouds of ash now leaped up with every step he took. Black haze veiled the morning sun. An acrid carbonized taste invaded his nostrils. The boy followed along behind him, astounded, dumbstruck.
Someone was calling down to him from a higher terrace: “Dumafice Moal, have you gone insane? Stop it! Stop!”
“I must,” he called back. “The garden is shameful to me. I have failed in my duties.”
Sparks were flying all around, now. Trees blossomed into bright flame. Here and there, huge blazing limbs broke free and toppled, shrouded in red, into the plantings below. He was aware that he was doing some damage to the gardens, but not nearly so much as these insects and animals and fungoid pests had achieved. And it was necessary damage, purgative damage. Only through fire could the garden be purified—could he be absolved of his shame—
He went on, beyond the alluailes and the flask-trees, deep into the navindombe bushes now. Behind him rose a dark, red-flecked mist of smoking embers. He aimed the energy-thrower here, here, here. Trees crashed in the distance. Enormous boughs landed with the soft sighing impact of wood that has burned from the inside out: dream-branches, dream-light. Cinders crunched underfoot. The ash was a thick, soft black powder that rose in choking puffs. The sky was turning red. A savage gloom prevailed everywhere. He no longer felt the pain at the top of his skull, no longer felt the guilt, even, of his failure—only the joy of what he was achieving now, the triumph of having restored purity to what had become impure, of having negated negation.
Angry voices cried out behind him.
He turned. He saw stunned faces, goggling eyes.
“Do you see?” he asked them proudly. “How much better it all is, now?”
“What have you done, Dumafice Moal?”
They came rushing through the cinder-beds toward him. Seized him by the arms. Threw him down, bound him hand and foot, while all the while he protested that his work was still unfinished, that much remained yet to be done, that he could not rest until he had saved the entire garden from its foes.
5
Word was beginning to spread up and down Castle Mount and outward into the lands beyond: the old Pontifex Confalume was dead, Lord Prestimion had gone to the Labyrinth to take the senior throne, Prince Dekkeret of Normork was to become the new Coronal. Already the portraits of the late Pontifex were being brought out of storage and put on display, bedecked now with the yellow streamers of mourning: Confalume as a vigorous young lord with bright keen eyes and a thick sweep of chestnut hair, Confalume the beloved gray-haired Coronal, Confalume the regal old Pontifex of the past two decades, whatever people could lay their hands on. Soon portraits of the new Lord Dekkeret would be generally available, and they would go up too on every wall and in every window, and, alongside them, pictures of the former Lord Prestimion, now Prestimion Pontifex, wearing the scarlet-and-black robes of his newly assumed high office.
Everywhere, preparations for great celebrations were getting under way: festivals, parades, pyrotechnic displays, tournaments, a worldwide holiday of joy. The arrival of a new Coronal on the scene was something of a novelty for modern-day Majipoor.
Over the thirteen thousand years of Majipoor’s history it normally happened only two or three times in a person’s life that a Pontifex died and new rulers came to the two capitals. But in the past century a change of monarchs had been even more of a rarity than that. Confalume had been Pontifex for the past twenty years, and Coronal for the forty-three before that. So more than sixty years had gone by since the
Pontifex Gobryas had died and was succeeded by the dashing young Lord Prankipin, who had chosen Prince Confalume to be his Coronal; and very few were still alive who remembered that day. Prankipin himself, dead some twenty years now, was only a name to the billions of younger folk who had come into the world during the Pontificate of Confalume.
The new Lord Dekkeret was not widely known outside the confines of the Castle—new Coronals rarely were—but everyone knew that he was a close and trusted associate of Lord Prestimion, and that was good enough. Lord Prestimion, like Lord Confalume before him, had been a greatly beloved Coronal, and there was general faith that he would choose a successor wisely and well.
Most people were aware that Dekkeret was of common birth, a young man of Normork who had first come to the attention of Lord Prestimion by thwarting an attempt on the Coronal’s life, back at the beginning of Prestimion’s reign. That was a most unusual thing, a commoner chosen to be Coronal, but it did happen every few hundred years. They knew that Dekkeret was a man of imposing stature and lordly mien, sturdy and handsome. Those who had had any contact with him in his travels through the world in his years as Prestimion’s designated heir had discovered that he was good-natured and easy of spirit, a man of open heart and generous soul. More than that, what sort of Coronal he would be, they would learn soon enough. Prestimion, throughout his years as king, had often left the Mount to visit cities far and wide. Very likely Dekkeret would do the same.