“Piurifayne is in Zimroel, my friend. An independent government of Zimroel, grateful for Piurivar assistance in the war of liberation, might show its gratitude in interesting ways.”
“Such as?”
“Full citizenship for your people? The right to move freely wherever you please, to hold property outside Piurifayne, to engage in any form of commerce?—An end to all forms of discrimination against your race, is what I’m offering. Complete equality throughout the continent. Does that interest you, Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp? Would it be worth putting troops along the Steiche for?”
“It would be if we could trust your promise, Count Mandralisca. But can we? Ah, can we, Count Mandralisca?”
“You will have my oath on it,” said Mandralisca piously. “And as my good friends here will testify, my oath is my sacred bond. Is that not so, Jacomin? Khaymak? Duke Thastain, I call upon you to speak on my behalf. I am a man of honor. Is that not so, my friends?”
10
At Kesmakuran, a neat little city of perhaps half a million souls five hundred miles deeper into the west-country, with row upon row of low square-roofed houses built mainly of a handsome pinkish-gold stone, Dekkeret halted to perform an act of homage at the tomb of Dvorn, the first Pontifex. Visiting the tomb was Zeldor Luudwid’s idea. “Dvorn is greatly venerated in these parts,” the chamberlain said. “It might well be taken as sacrilege, or at the very least a serious insult, if the Coronal were to come this way and not lay a wreath on his tomb.”
“The tomb of Dvorn,” Dekkeret repeated in wonder. “Can it really be? I’ve always thought of Dvorn as a purely mythical character.”
“Someone had to be the first Pontifex,” Fulkari pointed out.
“I grant you that. He may even have been named Dvorn, I suppose. That still doesn’t mean that anything we think we know about him has any foundation in reality, though. Not after thirteen thousand years. We’re talking about someone who lived almost as long before Lord Stiamot’s time as Stiamot is before ours.”
But Zeldor Luudwid was a persuasive person in his quiet, self-effacing way, and Dekkeret knew better than to ignore his advice. As the prime carryover from Lord Prestimion’s administration, he was better versed in the minutiae of the realm than anyone else in the new Coronal’s entourage.
And, according to Zeldor Luudwid, the Pontifex Dvorn was worshipped practically as a god in this region, the alleged place of his birth. The cult of Dvorn had adherents for a thousand miles in all directions.
It was right here in Kesmakuran, so it was claimed, that Dvorn had launched his uprising against whatever chaotic pre-Pontifical government had existed in the earliest days of the occupation of Majipoor by human settlers; and here he had been buried after a distinguished reign of nearly a hundred years. Pilgrims came constantly to his tomb, said Zeldor Luudwid, and knelt before the sacred vessels in which some of his hair and even one of his teeth were preserved, and begged the great Pontifex to intercede with the Divine for the continued welfare and security of the citizens of Majipoor.
Dekkeret had heard nothing about any of that before. But it was impossible for any Coronal to make himself familiar with all the multitudinous cults that had sprung up in the world since Prankipin had first begun his policy of encouraging superstitions of every variety.
What Dekkeret did know were the legendary tales: how in a troubled time, five or six hundred years after the first human colonists had arrived on Majipoor, a provincial leader named Dvorn had assembled an army somewhere in the west-country and marched across province after province, preaching a gospel of world unity and stability and gaining the allegiance of all those who had wearied of the strife between one district and another, until he was the master of the entire continent of Alhanroel. He had given himself the title of Pontifex, using a word that had meant “bridge-builder” in one of the languages of Old Earth, and had chosen Barhold, a young army officer, to govern the world in association with him, with the title of Coronal Lord. It was Dvorn who had decreed that upon the death of each Pontifex the Coronal Lord would succeed to that title and would select a new Coronal to take his own place. Thus he saw to it that the monarchy would never become hereditary: each Pontifex would pick the best qualified member of his staff as his successor, ensuring that the world would remain in capable hands from generation to generation.
All of that was told in the third canto of the vast epic poem that was every schoolchild’s bane, Aithin Furvain’s The Book of Changes. But it was significant that Dvorn was merely a name even to Furvain. Nowhere in the third canto or anywhere else did the poet make the slightest attempt to depict him as a person. He provided no hint of what Dvorn might have looked like; he told no anecdotes that gave insight into Dvorn’s character; Dvorn existed in the poem only in his function as founder of the government and primordial giver of laws.
So far as Dekkeret was concerned, Dvorn was entirely mythical, a traditional culture-hero, a symbolic figure that someone had invented to explain the origins of the Pontifical system. Dekkeret suspected that the medieval historians, feeling a need to attach a name to that otherwise unknown warrior who had helped to bring that system into being, and whose life and deeds and even identity had long since been lost in the mists of early history, had chosen to call him Dvorn.
As Fulkari had suggested, someone had to be the first Pontifex. Let him, then, be called Dvorn. It would never have occurred to Dekkeret that an actual tomb of Dvorn might exist in some remote part of west-central Alhanroel, complete with actual physical relics of the first Pontifex (several of his teeth, they said, a knucklebone or two, and also—after thirteen thousand years!—some of his hair), or that he was worshipped in a quasi-godlike fashion by the people of the area.
Yet here was the Coronal Lord Dekkeret in Kesmakuran, standing just outside the veritable tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn, making ready to present himself before the statue of the ancient monarch and humbly ask for Dvorn’s blessing on his reign.
He felt incredibly foolish. Prestimion had never warned him that being Coronal might involve his traveling around the land kneeling before provincial idols and sacred oracular trees and all manner of other fantastic idiocies, begging for the mercy of inanimate things. He was annoyed with Zeldor Luudwid for having pushed him into this thing. But there was no backing out of it now: it was his duty as Coronal, he supposed, to participate in the beliefs and observances of his people whenever he chose to leave the tranquility of Castle Mount and come out here among them; and it did not matter how inane those beliefs and observances might be.
The tomb was a deep artificial cave that had been carved, no one seemed to know how long ago, into the side of a good-sized mountain of black basalt just outside town. A pair of odd wooden structures that looked very much like cages were affixed to the cave wall on either side of the entrance to the tomb, high off the ground and reachable only by a narrow ladder of wooden struts connected by ropes. Each cage contained a vertically mounted wooden wheel, much like the water-wheel that a miller might use.
Two young women wearing only loincloths were marching constantly upward on the paddles of these wheels, causing them to revolve without cease. Their slender naked bodies gleamed with perspiration, but they moved tirelessly, keeping a steady rhythmic pace, as though they were mere parts of the machinery about them. Their faces showed the fixed expressions of sleepwalkers; their eyes stared far off into other worlds.