Beyond all doubt Dinitak was serious about this concubine business, crazy as it sounded. Dekkeret knew better than to try to argue with him in the area of moral niceties. Where matters of that sort were concerned, Dinitak inhabited a world of his own.
Dekkeret sighed.
“As you wish,” he said. “The girl stays home.”
The job of breaking the news to Keltryn became Fulkari’s responsibility. She and Dekkeret agreed that if they left the matter to Dinitak, his clumsy explanations would infuriate Keltryn to the point where the relationship could not survive.
But she became infuriated anyway. “The fool!” she cried. “The preposterous little prig! So holy that I can’t travel with him, is that it? Well, then. I’ll spare him the shame of it. I never want to see him again!”
“You will,” Fulkari said.
4
This would be Prestimion’s fifth visit to the Isle of Sleep. That was unusual in itself, and more so because he was Pontifex now. But Prestimion had been an unusual monarch since the earliest days of his reign.
A Coronal might visit the Isle once or twice during his reign, generally in the course of making a grand processionaclass="underline" the post of Lady of the Isle, after all, was normally held by the mother of the Coronal, and it was reasonable for the Coronal to want to visit his mother now and then.
But for him to go to the Isle once he had become Pontifex was a very different matter. The Pontifex normally would have no official reason for going there. Pontifexes did relatively little traveling in general, and such as they did do was usually confined to the continent of Alhanroel.
If the Pontifex’s prior reign as Coronal had been a lengthy one, his mother might well not have survived to the end of it: that had been the case with Lord Confalume, whose elder sister Kunigarda had served as Lady of the Isle during the latter half of his incumbency at the Castle. Any Lady who did live long enough to see her son’s ascent to the senior throne customarily would remain on the Isle even after she had retired from her duties to make room for the new Coronal’s mother. Former Ladies of the Isle dwelled at the capacious estate that was provided for them in the Terrace of Shadows on the Isle’s Third Cliff.
Perhaps her son the Pontifex might choose to pay a call on her there once he had settled fully into the responsibilities of his new post. But more often than not he would neglect to make the journey until it was too late: his mother died before he could find an opportunity to go, or he himself grew too old to want to travel. Whole centuries had gone by without a visit by a Pontifex to the Isle.
Prestimion, who had always had the closest and warmest of relationships with his mother the Lady Therissa, had journeyed to the Isle of Sleep in his early years as Coronal Lord in order to introduce his bride Varaile to her, and to enlist his mother’s aid in the struggle against the rebellious Dantirya Sambail. He had gone there again in the fifth year of his reign, having decided then to make his first grand processional for the sake of presenting himself to the world in the aftermath of the chaos that had been engendered by the Procurator Dantirya Sambail’s two insurrections. That time he had crossed Alhanroel by land, just as he had done now, and had taken ship at Alaisor for the Isle, and gone on from there to Zimroel, making stops at Piliplok on the eastern coast and at Ni-moya inland.
In his eleventh year Prestimion had chosen to make a second processional, this one following a similar route, but carrying him onward beyond Ni-moya, clear across Zimroel to the crystalline city of Dulorn and beyond it to the remote western cities of Pidruid and Narabal and Til-omon, where visits from a Coronal were few and far between. Prestimion had found occasion on that trip for still another visit to his mother. And in the sixteenth year of his reign as Coronal he had undertaken the third and last of his grand processionals, this one a truly extraordinary one that had taken him across the bottom of Alhanroel to Stoien, thence to the Isle yet again, and from there, to the astonishment of all the world, southward to the forbidding desert continent of Suvrael, that had not seen a Coronal’s face in three hundred years.
Now here he was arriving at the Isle once again. There before him in the sea reared the familiar colossal bulk of the place, that phenomenal wall of glittering white chalk rising high above the water, its three great tiers going up and up in diminishing circles to the holy sanctuary at the top, Inner Temple, where the Lady and her millions of acolytes dwelled. The sun, at this time of day, lay nearly overhead, and the smooth face of the Isle gleamed with an almost unbearable reflected brilliance in its intense light.
Large as the Isle was—and on any planet but Majipoor it would have been deemed a continent, not an island—it was accessible to shipping only at two harbors, Taleis on the western side facing Zimroel, and Nu-minor, in the Isle’s northeastern corner, looking toward Alhanroel. Prestimion had always come to the Isle by the Numinor entrance. Taleis port was a place he had never seen. He realized now, standing on the deck of the swift vessel that had brought him here this time and peering out yet again at the brilliant white rampart that surrounded the harbor at Numinor, that he probably never would.
This, so Prestimion expected, would be the last visit he would ever make to the Isle of Sleep. Nor would he go on to Zimroel when he was finished here, which might have justified a brief stop at Taleis to satisfy his curiosity. The world was Dekkeret’s now; Pontifexes did not undertake grand processionals; in years to come, as he aged, he would settle ever more deeply into his life at the Labyrinth.
A warm, sweet breeze blew toward them as their ship glided toward Numinor. Eternal summer was the rule in these latitudes. The Isle was forever in bloom: even from this distance Prestimion fancied that he could make out the bright colors of the groves of eldirons and tanigales and purple-blooming thwales that grew so profusely on its multitude of chalky terraces.
As they neared the Isle Varaile stood at Prestimion’s side, with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, who had accompanied the Pontifex on this voyage, nearby. The princes Taradath and Akbalik and Simbilon flanked their father and mother on the deck. The young Lady Tuanelys, who had no liking for ocean travel, had remained below in her cabin, as she had for most of the journey.
The ship’s captain, a massive Skandar with grayish-purple fur, called out for the anchor to be lowered.
“Why are we dropping anchor all the way out here?” Prince Simbilon asked.
Prestimion began to reply; but Taradath, who had made the journey to the Isle with his father on Prestimion’s last processional, spoke first: “Because any ship that’s fast enough to get us across from Alaisor to here in any decent time is going to be too big to fit into the harbor,” he said, a bit too patronizingly for Prestimion’s taste. “Numinor port’s a tiny little place, and they’ll have to take us in by ferry. You’ll see.”
The protocol for a visiting Coronal upon landing at Numinor was for him to stop first at the royal guesthouse known as Seven Walls, a single-story building of gray-black stone situated right on the seawall at the rampart of the port. There he was required to perform various rituals of purification before beginning the ascent to the uppermost of the three terraces, where the Lady would be waiting for him. It was generally the custom for the Coronal to go upward to the Lady, rarely for the Lady to come down to the shore to meet him.