He took her hand and she leaped lithely over the rim of the tub and into the huge towel that he held open for her. Gently, lovingly, he rubbed her dry as she nestled against him. Then he tossed the towel aside.
For the fiftieth time that day Dekkeret was struck by the luminous beauty of her, the radiance of her hair, the sparkle of her eyes, the strength and vigor of her features, the elegant compromise that her body had made between athletic trimness and feminine voluptuousness. And she was such a splendid companion, besides: clever, alert, perceptive, lively.
It amazed him constantly how close they had been to a parting of the ways. He still could hear, all too often, echoes of words that had once been spoken: Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal, she had said to him in that forest grove on Castle Mount. And he to Prestimion, in the Court of Thrones of the Labyrinth: It’s very clear that she’s the wrong woman for me. It was hard now to believe that they had ever said such things. But they had. They had. No matter, Dekkeret thought: time had passed and things were different now. They would marry as soon as this annoying business of Mandralisca was behind them.
His eyes encountered hers, and he saw the mischief glinting in them.
“But there’s no time now,” he said plaintively. “We have to get dressed. His excellence the mayor is awaiting us for lunch, and the tour of the city, and at sunset we go to see the celebrated talking trees.”
“You see? You see? It’s business all the time, for the Coronal and his consort!”
“Not all the time,” Dekkeret said, speaking very softly, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder. She was warm and fragrant from the bath. He ran his hands lightly down her long lean back, across her smooth rump, along her flanks. She trembled against him. But she was holding herself in check just as he was. “When today’s speechifying is over,” he said, “there’ll be just the two of us here, and we’ll have all night to ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, Dekkeret, I know! But first—duty calls!” She brushed her lips lightly against his to tell him that she had made her peace with that, that she understood that a king’s pleasure must wait until a king’s work was done.
Then she slipped from his grasp and held the door between their suites open for him, grinning, making little shooing gestures to send him off to his own place while she went about the task of dressing for the public events that lay ahead. He blew her a kiss and went through to get dressed himself: the royal robes in the green and gold colors emblematic of his high status, the ring, the pendant, all the little outward signs and symbols that marked him as king of the world.
She has changed, he thought. She has grown into her role. We will be very happy together.
But first, as Fulkari had said, duty called.
It was late in the afternoon before all the public formalities of the royal visit to Shabikant were behind them—the mayor’s lunch at the town hall had turned out to be, of course, an interminable banquet attended by all the city’s notables, with speech after speech of welcome and expressions of hope for a long and glorious reign—and Dekkeret and Fulkari at last, accompanied by Dinitak and several of Dekkeret’s aides, were being conducted back down to the river to view Shabikant’s greatest attraction, the Trees of the Sun and the Moon.
Mayor Kriskinnin Durch, almost beside himself with excitement, trotted along beside them. With him came half a dozen of the dignitaries who had been at the banquet, now wearing broad purple ribbons across their breasts that marked them, so the mayor explained, as officials of the priesthood of the trees. It was strictly an honorary distinction nowadays, he added: since the trees had been silent for thousands of years and the cult of their worship had fallen into disuse, the “priesthood” had in fact become a social society for the leading men of Shambikant.
Fulkari, letting a little flash of wickedness go flickering across her face, claimed now to be having second thoughts about the visit. “Do you think this is so wise, Dekkeret? What if they decide to speak again, after all this time, and they tell you something you’d just as soon not have heard?”
“I think the language of the trees has probably been forgotten by now, don’t you? But we can always opt not to hear the translation, if it hasn’t been. And if it’s a really bad prophecy the priests will surely pretend they can’t understand what the tree is saying, just as they did for Kolkalli.”
Twilight was not far off now. The sun, bronzy green at this hour, hung low over the Haggito, and in these latitudes gave the illusion of being oddly broadened and flattened in the final moment of its nightly descent through the western sky.
The trees were contained in a small oblong park at the river’s edge. A palisade of black metal posts terminating in sharp spikes protected them. They stood side by side, two solitary figures outlined against the darkening sky in an otherwise empty field.
The mayor made a great show of unlocking the gate and ushering the guests from Castle Mount inside.
“The Tree of the Sun is on the left,” he declared, in a tone throbbing with pride. “The Tree of the Moon is the one on the right.”
The trees were myrobolans, Dekkeret realized, but they were by far the biggest ones he had ever seen, titans of their kind, and must surely be very ancient indeed. Very likely they had been strikingly impressive, too, back in Lord Kolkalli’s time.
But it was easy to see that the two great trees were finally coming to the end of their days.
The vivid, distinctive patterns of alternating green-and-white stripes that marked the trunks of healthy myrobolans had faded and collapsed on these two into blurry formless blotches, and the tall thick trunks themselves had developed alarming curvatures, the Tree of the Sun leaning distressingly off to the south, the Tree of the Moon going the other way. Their many-branched crowns were nearly bare, with only a scattering of crescent-shaped gray leaves to cover them. Soil erosion at the two trees’ bases had exposed their gnarled brown roots, though an attempt had been made to hide that by strewing the region around each tree with little banners and ribbons and heaps of talismans. The entire look of the place seemed sad, even pathetic, to Dekkeret.
He and Fulkari had been provided with talismans of their own to contribute to the pile. Precisely at the moment of sunset they were supposed to go forward and offer them to the trees, which might then respond—here the mayor winked broadly—with oracular statements. Or, he said, they might not.
The sun’s lower rim was just touching the river, now. It began to sink slowly into it. Dekkeret waited, picturing in his mind the immense mass of the world as it rolled ponderously onward along its axis, carrying this district inexorably into darkness. Now the sun was half-gone. And now nothing but the copper glint of its upper curve remained. Dekkeret held his breath. All conversation among the townsmen had ceased. The air suddenly seemed strangely still. There was a certain drama about all this, he had to admit.
The mayor indicated with a nod that they should get ready to go forward in another moment.
Dekkeret glanced at Fulkari and they advanced solemnly to the trees, he to the female tree, she to the male one, and knelt and added their talismans to the mounds just as the last glimmer of the sun vanished in the west. Dekkeret bowed his head. The mayor had instructed him to speak to the trees in the privacy of his heart and ask them for guidance.
An intense silence ensued as the last light of day disappeared from the sky. No one in the group of townspeople standing behind them seemed even to be breathing.
And in that silence Dekkeret, in astonishment, thought that he did indeed hear something—a rusty, grinding sound, so faint that it scarcely crossed the threshold of his hearing, a sound that might have been rising from the ground out of the roots of the tree before which he knelt. Was it the huge old tree swaying in the first breeze of evening? Or had the oracle—how could it be possible?—actually spoken, offering the new Coronal a couple of groaning syllables of unintelligible wisdom?
He glanced again toward Fulkari. There was a strange look in her eyes, as if she had heard something too.
But then Kriskinnin Durch broke the spell with a cheerful, robust clapping of his hands. “Well done, my lord, well done! The trees have welcomed your gifts, and have, I hope, imparted their wisdom to you! What an honor for us this is, after all these years, a Coronal paying homage to our marvelous trees! What a wonderful honor!”
“You didn’t really hear anything, did you?” asked Fulkari in a low voice, as she and Dekkeret moved away.
Had he? No. No. Of course not, he decided.
“The murmuring of the wind is what I heard,” he said. “And maybe some shifting of the roots. But it’s all very dramatic, isn’t it? And spooky, even.”
“Yes,” said Fulkari. “Spooky.”