Prestimion was all but certain, now, that what was afflicting her had to be sendings from Mandralisca. But some part of him wanted not to believe that: wanted to cling to the wan hope that the poison-taster had not succeeded in making contact with his mother’s mind.
Grasping at shadows, he said, “Forgive me for this, mother, but I see little difference here between this dream and any of mine in which I chase Thismet down a corridor of a thousand slamming doors. Our sleeping minds generate ridiculous absurdities to torture us. But when I awaken from the Thismet dream I know that she’s long dead, and the dream evaporates like the empty thing it was; and when you awaken from your dream of being placed on trial you should know that you were never—”
“No.” The single syllable cut through his words like a knife. “Your dream, I agree, is nothing more than the floating upward of the crumbling debris of the past, like something drifting on the tide. You awaken and it’s gone, leaving only a troubling residue that remains just a little while. Mine is something quite other, Prestimion. It carries the force of reality. I awaken convinced of my own guilt and shame, utterly and unshakably convinced. And that feeling lingers on and on. It penetrates me like the venom of a serpent. I lie there sweating, shivering, knowing that I have failed the people of Majipoor, that in my term as Lady of the Isle I did nothing that was good, but only incalculable harm, to millions of people.”
“You are convinced of this.”
“Beyond all possibility of argument. It becomes more than a dream. It becomes a fact of my existence, as real to me as your father’s name and face. A basic part of me that nothing could eradicate.”
Prestimion’s last doubts of the nature and source of his mother’s dark dreams fell away from him. How could he resist the truth any longer? He had heard things much like this before, from Dekkeret, speaking of Teotas’s dreams. Guilt—shame—an overriding sense of unworthiness, of failure, of having betrayed those whom one had sworn to serve—
She was watching him. Those eyes—those eyes—!
“You aren’t saying anything, Prestimion. Do you understand in any way what I’m telling you?”
He nodded wearily. “Yes. Yes, I do. I understand very well. These are sendings that you’re receiving, mother. A malevolent force is reaching into your mind from without and implanting things, more or less the way the Lady of the Isle implants dreams in those she serves. But the Lady brings only benevolent dreams that have no more than the force of suggestion. These dreams of yours carry far greater power. They have the force of reality. They are something that you have no choice but to believe is true.”
The Lady Therissa seemed a little surprised. “So you know these things already, then!”
Again he nodded. “And I know who’s sending them, too.”
“As do I.” She touched her fingertips to her forehead. “I still have the circlet I wore when I was Lady of the Isle. I used it to reach out toward the source of my dreams and identify it. It is Mandralisca, back at his evil work again.”
“I know.”
“He has killed Teotas, I think, by sending him dreams that were beyond his power to endure.”
“I know that too,” Prestimion said. “Dekkeret has worked it out, bit by bit, with the help of his friend Dinitak Barjazid. There is another Barjazid loose in the land, the brother of the one I killed at Stoienzar. He has allied himself with the poison-taster, who himself is in league with the kinsmen of Dantirya Sambail, and these hellish thought-control helmets are being made again. They have been used against Teotas, and against you, and also, I think, Varaile, and even, it may be, against my little daughter Tuanelys.”
“But not, so far, against you.”
“No. Nor do I expect that. I think he may be afraid to challenge me outright. To attack the Pontifex is to attack Majipoor itself: the people will not follow him there. No, mother, what he wants is to intimidate me by striking at those who are closest to me, I think, hoping that he can force me into making a deal of some kind with him and the people he serves. To grant them political control in Zimroel, perhaps. To restore to them the authority that I took away from the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”
“He will kill you, if he can,” the Lady Therissa said.
Prestimion rejected that idea with a sweeping gesture of his hand. “That’s something that I don’t fear at all. I doubt that he would attempt it; I know that if he tried, he would not succeed.” He left his seat and crouched at her side, resting one hand lightly over her forearm and staring up into her ravaged eyes. Tautly he said, “The one who will die, mother, is Mandralisca. You can be certain of that. I would slay him for what he did to Teotas, alone. But now that I know what he has done to you—”
“It’s your plan to make war against him, then,” she said, stating it, not asking.
“Yes.”
“And raise an army and invade Zimroel and destroy this man with your own hand? I hear it in your voice. Is that what you mean to do, Prestimion?”
“Not I myself,” Prestimion said quickly, for he could see where she was heading with this. The patterns of conflict crossing her features were obvious, her fierce loathing for Mandralisca and all he represented playing against her fears for her eldest son’s life. “Oh, what I would give to be the one who cuts him down! I won’t attempt to deceive you about that. But my days on the battlefield, I’m afraid, have been over for a very long time, mother. Dekkeret is my sword now.”
6
It was the sixteenth day of Dekkeret’s journey across the broad central plain of Alhanroel to the great city of the northwestern coast, Alaisor. He had arrived now at the city of Shabikant on the River Haggito, a muddy southward-flowing stream that came down from the Iyann. The one and only thing Dekkeret knew about Shabikant was that it was the place where the famous Trees of the Sun and the Moon grew.
“We should visit them while we have the chance,” he told Fulkari. “We may never pass this way again.”
As Prestimion had suggested, the Coronal and his party had taken the land route to Alaisor. It would have been far quicker to go by river-boat down Castle Mount via the Uivendak and its tributaries to the swift River Iyann, which would carry them onward to the shores of the Inner Sea. But there was no need for haste, since Prestimion would be making the long trip to the Isle before returning to Alhanroel, and he and Dekkeret were both agreed that there were advantages to be gained in having the new Coronal present himself formally at various major cities while on his way west, rather than hurrying by them by riverboat, with no more than a wave and a smile for the millions of people whom he would pass.
Therefore he had gone by way of the Great Western Highway to the grim mercantile center of Sisivondal in the midst of the dusty Camaganda drylands, a journey that was exceedingly ugly but spared them the troublesome crossing of the rugged Trikkala Mountains, and from Sisivondal across the great curving bosom of Majipoor through Skeil and
Kessilroge and Gannamunda and Hunzimar into the grassy Vale of Gloyn, where enormous herds of bizarre animals grazed placidly in huge savannas of copper-colored gattaga-grass, and onward beyond Gloyn, the halfway point between Castle Mount and Alaisor, in a gently north-northwesterly direction, stopping here and there to confer the honor of the new Coronal’s presence on this provincial duke and that rural mayor. With not a word said to anyone along the way, of course, of the growing disturbance in Zimroel. That was no one’s business except the Coronal’s, thus far. Certainly these good people of west-central Alhanroel had no need to know about the minor unrest on the other continent.
Dinitak, by donning his helmet daily, was keeping Dekkeret apprised of what was going on over there. The five nephews of Dantirya Sambail had returned from their wanderings in the desert and set up a headquarters in the city of Ni-moya, something that they were not exactly forbidden to do, but provocative all the same. And it appeared that they had taken control of Ni-moya and the region immediately surrounding it, which, if the reports that Dinitak’s mind-trollings had brought back were correct, was definitely a violation of Prestimion’s twenty-year-old decree stripping Dantirya Sambail and his heirs forever of any and all political power in Zimroel.