Toward noon came a second sign: up from the heaving surf tumbled a great fat pudding of a rip-toad, all belly and mouth and saw-edged teeth. It staggered a few yards ashore and hunkered down in the sand, panting, shivering, blinking its vast milky-hued eyes. A second toad emerged a moment later not far away and sat staring malevolently at the first. Then came a little procession of big-leg lobsters, a dozen or more gaudy blue and purple creatures with swollen orange haunches, that marched from the water with great determination and quickly began to dig themselves into the mud. They were followed by red-eyed scallops dancing on wiry little yellow legs, and little angular white-faced hatchet-eels, and even some fish, that lay helplessly flopping about as the crabs of the shore fell upon them.
The Liimen nodded to each other in rising excitement. Only one thing could cause the creatures of the offshore shallows to stray up onto the land this way. The musky smell of the sea dragons, preceding the dragons themselves by a little while, must have begun to pervade the water.
“Look now,” the eldest male said shortly.
Out of the south came the vanguard of the dragons, two or three dozen immense beasts holding their black leathery wings spread high and wide and their long massive necks curving upward and out like great bows. Serenely they moved into the groves of seaweed and began to harvest them: slapping their wings against the surface of the water, stirring turmoil among the creatures of the seaweed, striking with sudden ferocity, gulping weed and lobsters and rip-toads and everything else, indiscriminately. These giants were males. Behind them swam a little group of females, rolling from side to side in the manner of pregnant cows to display their bulging flanks; and after them, by himself, the king of the herd, a dragon so big he looked like the upturned hull of some great capsized vessel, and that was only the half of him, for he let his haunches and tail dangle out of sight below the surface.
“Down and give praise,” said the eldest male, and fell to his knees.
With the seven long bony fingers of his outstretched left hand he made the sign of the sea dragon again and again: the fluttering wings, the swooping neck. He bent forward and rubbed his cheek against the cool moist sand. He lifted his head and looked toward the sea-dragon king, who now was no more than two hundred yards off shore, and tried by sheer force of will to urge the great beast toward the land.
—Come to us … come … come …
—Now is the time. We have waited so long. Come …save us … lead us … save us …
—Come!
10
With a mechanical flourish he signed his name to what seemed like the ten thousandth official document of the day: Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent. He scribbled the date next to his name, and one of Valentine’s secretaries selected another sheaf of papers and put it down in front of him.
This was Elidath’s day for signing things. It seemed to be a necessary weekly ordeal. Every Twoday afternoon since Lord Valentine’s departure he left his own headquarters in the Pinitor Court and came over to the Coronal’s official suite here in the inner Castle, and sat himself down at Lord Valentine’s magnificent desk, a great polished slab of deep red palisander with a vivid grain that resembled the starburst emblem, and for hours the secretaries took their turns handing him papers that had come up from the various branches of the government for final approval. Even with the Coronal off on his grand processional, the wheels continued to turn, the unending spew of decrees and revisions of decrees and abrogations of decrees poured forth. And everything had to be signed by the Coronal or his designated regent, the Divine only knew why. One more: Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent. And the date. There.
“Give me the next,” Elidath said.
In the beginning he had conscientiously tried to read, or at least to skim, every document before affixing his signature. Then he had settled for reading the little summary, eight or ten lines long, that each document bore clipped to its cover. But he had given up even that, long ago, Did Valentine read them all? he wondered. Impossible. Even if he read only the summaries, he would spend all his days and nights at it, with no time left to eat or sleep, let alone to carry out the real responsibilities of his office. By now Elidath signed most without even glancing at them. For all he knew or cared, he might be signing a proclamation forbidding the eating of sausages on Winterday, or one that made rainfall illegal in Stoienzar Province, or even a decree confiscating all his own lands and turning them over to the retirement fund for administrative secretaries. He signed anyway. A king—or a king’s understudy—must have faith in the competence of his staff, or the job becomes not merely overwhelming but downright unthinkable.
He signed. Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and—
“Next!”
He still felt a little guilty not reading them anymore. But did the Coronal really need to know that a treaty had been reached between the cities of Muldemar and Tidias, concerning the joint management of certain vineyards the title to which had been in dispute since the seventh year of the Pontifex Thimin and the Coronal Lord Kinniken? No. No. Sign and move on to other things, Elidath thought, and let Muldemar and Tidias rejoice in their new amity without troubling the king about it.
Elidath of Morvole—
As he reached for the next and began to search for the place to sign, a secretary said, “Sir, the lords Mirigant and Divvis are here.”
“Have them come in,” he replied without looking up.
Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent—
The lords Mirigant and Divvis, counsellors of the inner circle, cousin and nephew respectively of Lord Valentine, met him every afternoon about this time, so that he could go running with them through the streets of the Castle, and thereby purge his taut-nerved body of some of the tension that this regency was engendering in him. He had scarcely any other opportunity for exercise these days: the daily jaunt with them was an invaluable safety valve for him.
He managed to sign two more documents during the time that they were entering the huge room, so splendidly paneled with strips of bannikop and semotan and other rare woods, and making their way toward him with a clatter of booted feet against the elaborately inlaid floor. He picked up a third, telling himself that it would be the last one he’d do this day. It was merely a single sheet, and somehow Elidath found himself idly scanning it as he signed: a patent of nobility, no less, raising some fortunate commoner to the rank of Initiate Knight of Castle Mount, in recognition of his high merit and greatly valued services and this and that—
“What are you signing now?” Divvis asked, leaning across the desk and penciling at the paper in front of Elidath. He was a big, heavy-shouldered, dark-bearded man, who as he came into his middle years was taking on an eerie resemblance to his father, the former Coronal. “Is Valentine lowering taxes again? Or has he decided to make Carabella’s birthday a holiday?”
Accustomed though he was to Divvis’s brand of wit, Elidath had no taste for it after a day of such dreary meaningless work. Sudden anger flared in him. “Do you mean the Lady Carabella?” he snapped.
Divvis seemed startled. “Oh, are we so formal today, High Counsellor Elidath?”
“If I happened to refer to your late father simply as Voriax, I can imagine what you—”
“My father was Coronal,” said Divvis in a cold, tight voice, “and deserves the respect we give a departed king. Whereas the Lady Carabella is merely—”