In the city of Ertsud Grand, midway up Castle Mount, the custodians of the Summer Palace began to make plans for an early visit by the new Coronal to the auxiliary residence that was maintained there for his use.
At this point such talk was, they knew, mainly wishful thinking. Ertsud Grand, a city of nine million people in the circle of the Mount known as the Guardian Cities, had been a favorite secondary residence of Coronals for centuries; but Lord Gobryas, who had come to the throne almost ninety years ago, had been the last one to make any regular use of the beautiful dwelling that was set aside for him there. Lord Prankipin had visited the Summer Palace no more than half a dozen times in his twenty years on the Mount. Lord Confalume, though, had gone there only twice in a reign two times as long. As for Lord Prestimion, he had never been to Ertsud Grand at all, and seemed altogether unaware that the Summer Palace existed.
Yet it was a beautiful palace in a beautiful city. Ertsud Grand was known as the City of Eight Thousand Bridges, though its citizens would always tell wondering visitors, “Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Probably there are no more than seven or eight hundred.” Streams from three sides of the Mount met and mingled there, providing the city with a watery underbedding before draining downward to create the Huyn River, one of the six that descended the slopes of Castle Mount.
A network of canals connected the various sectors of Ertsud Grand, so that it was possible to go all about the city by boat. All the main canals flowed toward the Central Market—which in fact was in the eastern half of the city, rather than being truly central—where, in a gigantic cobble-stoned plaza bordered by tall warehouses of white stone, luxury goods from every part of Majipoor were bought and sold. Here were dealers in unusual meats and fishes, in exotic spices, in voluptuous furs from the cold northern marches of Zimroel, in the green pearls of the tropical Rodamaunt Archipelago and the transparent topaz that was mined by night at Zeberged, in the wines of a hundred regions, in the small animals and strange insects that the people of Ertsud Grand favored as pets, and much more besides.
To provide the western sector of the city with a focal point that would be as important an attraction in its way as the Central Market was on the eastern side, the ancient planners of Ertsud Grand had dammed up half a dozen of the larger streams, creating the body of water known as the Great Lake. It was perfectly circular and a rich sapphire blue in color, ten miles in circumference and glinting like a giant mirror in the midday sun. All around its shores were the palaces and mansions of wealthy merchants and the city’s nobility, and a host of pleasure-pavilions and sporting parlors. Boats and flat-bottomed barges of the most elaborate sort, painted in bright colors, went back and forth among these buildings all day long.
The Summer Palace, the masterwork of the long-ago and otherwise forgotten Lord Kassarn, was situated on a large artificial island in the Great Lake’s precise center. It was, in fact, two palaces, one within another: an outer one made of pink marble and an inner one fashioned entirely of bamboo canes.
The marble palace was a kind of habitable continuous walclass="underline" a joined series of pavilions, their roofs supported by columns inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, with a multitude of apartments and colonnaded cloisters and banquet-halls and courtyards. The guest rooms—there were scores of them, spacious and airy—were decorated with fanciful murals of the lives of the early Coronal Lords. Here, once upon a time, Coronals seeking respite from the routines of the daily business of the Castle would come in summer to hold court and give lavish feasts for their chief lords, the nobility of the cities of the Mount, and visiting dignitaries.
Within this ringlike marble building, which occupied the entire perimeter of the island, was an extensive park where wild animals of many sorts were allowed to roam—gibizongs, plaars, semboks and dimilions, shy and dainty bilantoons, prancing spiral-horned gambulons, small furry krefts that ran around like animated balls of fluff with stiff upraised tails, and a herd of fifty white kibrils whose red eyes blazed in their broad foreheads like huge rubies. And at the very heart of the park was the Summer Palace proper, intended as the Coronal’s private refuge.
It was most elegantly designed, made of the sturdy black bamboo of Sippulgar, which has canes nearly as hard as iron. The canes were six inches in diameter, cut to twenty-foot lengths, gilded, and bound by silken cords. Not a single nail had been used anywhere. The roof also was made of bound lengths of Sippulgar cane, varnished annually with the red sap of the grifafa tree, which preserved it against all decay. Interior columns, these likewise of bamboo canes tied three together, formed its supports. Sea-dragon emblems in red surmounted each column.
The Summer Palace stood on a little hillock that lifted it above the rest of the island, affording the Coronal a vista of the distant shores of the Great Lake. So artfully had the building been constructed that it would be only the work of a single day, supposedly, to dismantle it and shift it to face in a different direction, in case the Coronal should tire of the view from his bedroom and request another. Those who had been allowed to tour the palace in modern times—visiting dukes and counts, members of the families of former Coronals, important captains of industry who had come to Ertsud Grand leading trade missions—were inevitably told of this special feature of its design. In Lord Kassarn’s day, so the story went, the palace was taken down and repositioned every year just before the Coronal came to Ertsud Grand for his summer retreat. Sometimes, at the Coronal’s request, it had been done more frequently than that. But no one actually could remember the last such occasion.
Though visits by Coronals to the Summer Palace had become uncommon events in modern times, and no Coronal at all had gone there during the past thirty-five years, the municipality of Ertsud Grand kept both structures, the marble pavilion and the one of bamboo, constantly in readiness for his lordship’s imminent arrival. Maintenance of the buildings was entrusted to a curator with the title of Major-Domo of the Palaces, and he had a staff of twenty full-time employees who swept the hallways, dusted the paintings and statues, trimmed the shrubbery, fed the beasts of the park, repaired what needed to be repaired, and each week put fresh linens on the beds in all the innumerable rooms.
The position of major-domo was hereditary. For the past five hundred years it had been a perquisite of the family of Eruvni Semivinvor, who had been a kinsman of a famous ancient mayor of Ertsud Grand. The current major-domo—Gopak Semivinvor, the fourth of that name—had held the post for almost half a century, and so it had fallen to him to greet Lord Confalume on the occasion of the second of his two visits to the Summer Palace.
That visit, which had lasted four days, was the high point of Gopak Semivinvor’s life. Again and again he relived it in the years that followed: hailing the Coronal and his wife the Lady Roxivail as they disembarked from the royal barge, conducting them through the marble outer palace and the game park to the bamboo palace, opening their wine for them and personally serving them their first meal, then leaving them together in splendid regal privacy. Public rumor had it that the Coronal’s marriage was a troubled one; Gopak Semivinvor was convinced that Lord Confalume and Lady Roxivail had come to Ertsud Grand in an attempt at reconciliation, and he never ceased to believe that such a reconciliation had indeed taken place during those four days, despite all the subsequent evidence to the contrary.