But now his mother also? His mother? She who for twenty years had been the world’s beloved Lady, and now wanted to live only in peaceful retirement? This was intolerable.
Before he could reply, though, Varaile said, breaking a long silence, “My daughter Tuanelys has had troubled dreams recently as well, your ladyship.” Though she had addressed the Lady Taliesme, she was looking at no one in particular. She was hollow-eyed and haggard, having had yet another bleak dream herself in the night just past. “She cries out, she shivers in fright, she bursts into sweat. It was dreams of this sort, night after night, that drove Prince Teotas to take his life. And even I—I, too—”
Varaile was trembling. Taliesme looked toward her in shock and surprise. “Oh—my dear woman—my dear—”
Prestimion went to his wife and rested his hands gently on her shoulders to soothe her. But he maintained a calm tone of voice as he said, as though musing over the irony of it, “The Lady of the Isle receiving dreams instead of sending them? The former Lady, I mean. But even so: it seems so strange.—Has my mother described these dreams to you?”
“Not very clearly, majesty. Either she is unable to be specific, or unwilling. All I get from her is vague talk of demons, monsters, dark images—and something else, something deeper and more subtle and powerfully distressing, which she absolutely will not describe at all.” Taliesme touched the tips of her fingers to her silver circlet. “I’ve offered to enter her mind and probe for the source, or to have one of the more experienced hierarchs of the Isle do it. But she will not allow it. She says that one who was once the Lady of the Isle must not open herself to the circlet of the Lady. Is that true, majesty? Is there some prohibition against doing that?”
“Not that I know of,” said Prestimion. “But the Isle has its own customs, and few outside it know anything about them. I’ll speak of this with her when I get to see her.”
“You should,” Taliesme said. “I’ll mince no words, majesty. She suffers terribly. She should avail herself of whatever aid can be had, and she of all people should know that we stand ready here to help her.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“And another thing, majesty. These dreams, which have entered your family so freely—they are widespread throughout the world. Again and again I’m told by my acolytes that as they monitor the minds of sleeping people they detect pain, shock, torment. I tell you, your majesty, we spend nearly all of our time now with such people, seeking them out, trying through sendings to heal their suffering—”
So it was even worse than he had expected. Prestimion let his eyelids drift shut, and sat in silence for a time.
When he spoke again, it was in the quietest of voices. “It is almost like an epidemic of madness, would you not say, your ladyship?”
“An epidemic indeed,” said Taliesme.
“We’ve had such a thing on Majipoor before. In the early years of my reign as Coronal, it was. I found out what was causing it, and I took steps to bring an end to it. This is, I think, a plague of a somewhat different sort, but I think I know what is causing this one too, and I tell you in the most solemn way that I’ll bring an end to this one as well. An old enemy of mine is loose in the land. He will be dealt with.—When will I be able to see my mother, your ladyship?”
“It is too late in the day now to make the ascent to Third Cliff,” Taliesme answered. Her face was set and somber and there was no sparkle in her eyes now. She and he had passed far beyond the pleasant courtesies of an hour before. Each now understood that a serious challenge lay ahead for them all. The note of fierce determination in Prestimion’s tone seemed to have had a powerful effect on her. With just a few words he had conveyed a sense of present crisis, of impending large events that would require her participation at a time when she had only begun to take command of the great powers of the Isle. “I will escort you to her in the morning.”
5
Prestimion had dreams himself, that night.
Not nightmares, not him, for he was certain that the scheming poison-taster in Zimroel would not dare to approach the mind of Prestimion Pontifex. These were dreams of his own mind’s devising. But they were wearisome dreams all the same, for in them he went up and up the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep over and over again, forever ascending, never reaching the summit, an endless frustrating daylong journey past terrace after terrace that invariably culminated in his finding himself, at the end, at the very place from which he had set out. By morning Prestimion felt as though he had been climbing the wall of this island all his life. But he concealed his night of uneasy sleep from Varaile. She was preoccupied with Tuanelys: had gone to the little girl’s bedroom more than once during the night, although it had turned out, each time, that Varaile had been imagining Tuanelys’s cries, and the child had been sleeping soundly.
And now it was time for them to begin the upward journey in earnest. May the Divine grant us an easier trip, Prestimion prayed, than the ones I have been making all night.
He held the Lady Tuanelys on his lap aboard the floater-sled that would take them up the vertical wall that was the face of First Cliff. Varaile sat to one side of him, the Lady Taliesme to the other, and the boys in back. When the sled began its giddy climb, Tuanelys, frightened, wriggled about so that her face was buried in her father’s chest; but Prestimion heard a whistle of appreciation from Prince Akbalik as they shot silently and swiftly upward against gravity’s pull. He smiled at that: Akbalik was usually so restrained and serious. But perhaps the boy was beginning to change as he entered adolescence.
At the landing pad at the summit, Prestimion pointed out Numinor port far below, and the jutting arms of the breakwater where the ferry had delivered them to land. Tuanelys did not want to look. The two younger boys were wonderstruck, though, at the height of the ascent they had made. “That’s nothing,” Taradath said scornfully. “We’ve only begun to go up.”
Prestimion found that the children were a welcome distraction during the long journey. It worried him that Taliesme might have held back some of the most disquieting details of the Lady Therissa’s health, and he did not want to think too deeply about what waited for him above. So he derived great pleasure from watching Taradath, who had seen all this before, don the role of tour guide to his brothers and sister, loftily telling them, whether they wanted to know or not, that this was the Terrace of Assessment, where all pilgrims to the Isle were brought first, and this was the Terrace of Inception, and this the Terrace of Mirrors, and so on and so on throughout the day. It was amusing, too, to observe how little the other three cared to be instructed by their know-it-all oldest brother.
“We always stop for the night here at the Terrace of Mirrors,” said Taradath grandly, as if this were a trip he made every six months or so. “First thing in the morning we go up to Second Cliff. It makes you dizzy, you do it so fast. But the view from up there is fantastic. Just you wait.”
Out of the corner of his eye Prestimion caught sight of Prince Simbilon making a face at Taradath behind Taradath’s back, and smiled.
Taradath would be seventeen soon, Prestimion thought. He made a mental note to talk with Varaile about sending him back to the Castle next year, enrolled as a knight-initiate. There was no reason why the grown son of a Pontifex had to remain with his family at the Labyrinth; and it would probably do Taradath some good to have the other young men of the Castle take him down a peg or two. Prestimion had done his best to teach Taradath that once he had entered adult life he would enjoy no special privileges or deferences simply because he was the Pontifex’s son, but perhaps that was a lesson better learned at the hands of one’s own peers.