The King of Dreams

by Robert Silverberg

  She faced him squarely, holding her rapier at rest by her side. The instant Septach Melayn raised his weapon she lifted hers and turned sideways into the fencing position, ready to meet his attack. The profile she presented was a very narrow one: from her first day in the class she had bound her breasts with some tight undergarment so that it appeared she had none at all beneath her white fencing jacket. Just as well, Septach Melayn thought. He was unaccustomed to fencing with someone who had breasts.

  This was the first rapier lesson since she had joined the group. Keltryn was holding the weapon oddly, and Septach Melayn shook his head and lightly tapped her sword downward. “Let us begin by considering the placement of the hand, milady. We use the Zimroel style of handle here: the grip is a longer one than you may be familiar with, and we hold it farther back from the guard. You will find it gives greater freedom of action that way.”

  She made the adjustment. The mask hid any sign of embarrassment or displeasure over the correction. When Septach Melayn lifted his sword again, she raised hers, waggling it as if to indicate that she was impatient to begin the lesson.

  Impatience was something he would not tolerate. Deliberately, he made her wait.

  “Let us consider certain fundamentals,” he said. “Our intention with this weapon, as I believe you know, is to lunge and thrust, and to parry our opponent’s counterthrust, and to make our own riposte. The point of the weapon is all we use. The entire body is the target. You should be familiar already with all of that. The special thing I teach you here is the division of the moment. Have you heard the term, milady?”

  She shook her head.

  “What we say is, a good fencer must seize control of time, rather than being controlled by it. In our daily lives we perceive time as a continuous flow, a river that moves without cease from source to mouth. But in fact a river is made up of tiny units of water, each distinct from every other one. Because they move in the same direction they give the illusion of unity. It is only an illusion, though.”

  Did she understand? She gave no clue.

  Septach Melayn continued, “It is the same with time. Each minute of an hour is a separate entity. The same with each second of a minute. Your task is to isolate the units within each second, and to view your opponent as moving from one unit to the next in a series of discontinuous leaps. It is a difficult discipline; but once you achieve it, it is a simple thing to interpose yourself between one of his leaps and the next. For example—”

  He called her on guard, took the offensive immediately, lunged and let her parry, lunged again and this time countered her parry by beating her blade aside, so that he had a clear path to the tip of her left shoulder, which he touched; and withdrew and thrust once more, before she had had time to register that she had been struck, and touched the other shoulder. A third time he slipped within her guard and touched her carefully, very carefully, at the bony middle of her chest, just above the place where he imagined the dividing point between her flattened breasts to lie.

  The entire demonstration had taken only a handful of seconds. His movements nowadays seemed slow, terribly slow, to him, but Septach Melayn was judging himself by the standards of twenty years ago. There still was no one who could match his speed.

  “Now,” he said, shoving his mask back and relaxing his stance, “the purpose of what I’ve just done was not to show you that I am the superior fencer, which I think we all can take for granted, but to indicate the way the theory of the division of the moment operates. What you experienced just now, I suspect, was a perplexing blur of action in which a taller and more skillful opponent heartlessly came at you from all sides at once and pinked you again and again while you struggled to comprehend the pattern of his moves. Whereas what I experienced was a series of discrete intervals, frozen frames of action: you were here and then you were over there, and I entered the interval between those positions and touched your shoulder. I withdrew and returned and found an opening between the next two intervals and penetrated your guard once again. And so forth. Do you follow?”

  “Not in any useful way, excellence.”

  “No. I didn’t suppose you would. But let’s replay the sequence, now. I will do everything in precisely the same way. This time, though, try to see me not as a whirlwind of continuous activity, but as a series of still tableaus in which I hold this position and then this one and then the next. That is, you must see me faster, so that I appear to be moving more slowly. That may make no sense to you now, but I think that sooner or later it will.—On your guard, milady!”

  He ran through it all a second time. This time she was, if anything, even more ineffectual, though she knew the direction his moves would be coming from. There was a desperation to her parrying, a frenzied hurry, that pulled her far off form and forced him to stretch to full extension to touch her as he had before. But she did seem also to be trying to comprehend his enigmatic talk about the division of the moment. She appeared to be attempting somehow to slow the flight of time by waiting until the last possible moment to react to his thrusts. Then, of course, she had to rush her parries. Against a swordsman like Septach Melayn that had to be a recipe for disaster; but at least she was trying to understand the method.

  Again he touched shoulder, shoulder, breastbone.

  Again he halted and pushed back the mask. She did the same. Her face was flushed, and she had a sullen, glowering look.

  “Much better that time, milady.”

  “How can you say that? I was horrible. Or are you simply trying to mock me…your grace?”

  “Ah, no, milady. I’m here to teach, not to mock. You handle yourself well, better, perhaps, than you know. The potential is definitely there. But these skills are not mastered in a single day. I wanted to show you, only, the area within which you must work.” It was an appealing challenge, he thought, making a great swordsman out of a girl like this. “Now watch while I run through the same maneuvers with someone to whom my theories are more familiar. Observe, if you will, how calm he remains in the midst of the attack, how he appears to be standing still when actually he is in motion.” Septach Melayn glanced toward the middle of the group. “Audhari?”

  He was the best of Septach Melayn’s pupils, a Stoienzar boy with red freckles all over his face, the great-grandson of the former High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin of Lord Confalume’s reign and therefore in some way a distant kinsman of Prestimion’s. He was big and strong, with powerful forearms, and the quickest reflexes Septach Melayn had encountered in a long time.

  “On your guard,” said Septach Melayn, and went at once to the attack. Audhari stood no more chance than anyone else of besting him, but he was able to make the pauses, anyway, to hold back the tumbling of the moments one upon another. And so he was able to anticipate, to parry, to find the opportunity between one instant and the next for a counterthrust or two, in general to hold his own commendably enough, all things considered, as Septach Melayn went methodically about the task of breaking through his guard again and again and again.

  Even as he worked, Septach Melayn was able to steal a glance at the watching Keltryn. She was staring intently, in absolute concentration.

  She will learn it, he decided. She could never be as strong as a man, she would probably not be as quick as one, but her eye was good, her will to succeed excellent, her stance quite satisfactory in form. He still could not understand why a young woman would want to take up swordsmanship, but he resolved to treat her with as much seriousness as he did any of his other pupils.

  “You are not yet able to see,” he told the girl, “how Audhari goes about severing one moment from the next. It is done within the mind, a technique that requires long practice. But watch, this time, how he turns to meet each thrust. Pay no attention to me whatever. Watch only him.—Again, Audhari. On your guard!”

  “Sir?” The voice was that of Polliex. “A messenger has come, your grace.” Septach Melayn became aware that someone had entered the room, one of the Castle pages, evidently. He stepped back
from Audhari and cast his mask aside.

  The boy was carrying a note, folded in thirds, unsealed. Septach Melayn scanned it hastily from both ends at once, as was his way, taking in the scrawled “V” of the Lady Varaile’s signature at the bottom even while he was reading the body of the text. Then he read it more carefully, as though that might somehow alter the content of the message, but it did not.

  He looked up.

  “The Pontifex Confalume has died,” Septach Melayn said. “Lord Prestimion, who was on his way back from the Labyrinth, has turned about and returned to it for his majesty’s funeral. As High Counsellor, I am summoned there as well. The class is adjourned. We will, I think, not meet again for some time.”

  The class dissolved into a buzzing hubbub. Septach Melayn walked through their midst as though they were invisible and went from the room.

  So it has happened at last, he thought, and now everything will change.

  Confalume gone; Prestimion Pontifex; a new man on the throne at the Castle. A new High Counsellor would have to be named, also. True, Korsibar had kept Oljebbin on in that post after seizing the crown, but surely would soon have replaced him if his reign had lasted long enough for him to think about such things; and Prestimion, after the end of the usurpation, had lost no time putting his own man in the spot. Dekkeret, in all likelihood, would want to do the same. In any case Septach Melayn knew that he belonged with Prestimion in the Labyrinth. That was expected of him, and he would comply. But still—still—they had said that Confalume would recover, that he was in no imminent danger of dying—

  All this was a great deal to have to wrap his mind around, so early in the day.

  Turning the corridor that connected the east wing with the Inner Castle, Septach Melayn went past the vaulted gray building that was the new Prestimion Archive and the wildly swooping weirdness of Lord Arioc’s Watchtower. Entering the Pinitor Court, he caught sight of Dekkeret coming toward him from the other direction, with the Lady Fulkari at his side. They were wearing riding clothes, and had a rumpled, sweaty look about them, as though they had been outside the Castle for a ride in the meadows and were just returning.

  Now it begins, Septach Melayn thought.

  “My lord!” he called.

  Dekkeret looked toward him, openmouthed with surprise. “What was that you said, Septach Melayn?”

  “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” Septach Melayn cried, hands outstretched to make the starburst sign. “Long life to Lord Dekkeret!” And then, in a quieter tone: “I am the first to utter those words, I think.”

  They were both staring, Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, frozen, astounded. Then Septach Melayn saw them exchange stunned glances. Huskily Dekkeret said, “What is this, Septach Melayn? What are you doing?”

  “Offering the proper salutation, my lord. News has come from the Labyrinth, it seems. Prestimion has become Pontifex, and we have a new Coronal to hail. Or will, as soon as the Council can meet. But the thing is as good as done, my lord. You are our king now; and so I salute you.—You seem displeased, my lord. What could I have said to offend you?”

  II

  The Book of Lords

  1

  The moist, humid lands beyond the Kinslain Gap were Hjort territory. It was the sort of land where few other people cared to live, but the Hjorts were native to a steamy world of spongy soil and constant torrid fog, and they found conditions here ideal. Besides, they knew that they were not well liked by the other races that inhabited Majipoor, who found their appearance unattractive and their manner abrasive and irritating, and thus they preferred to have a province of their own, where they could live their lives as they pleased.

  Their chief center was the small, densely packed city of Santhiskion. It contained two million of them, or perhaps even more. Santhiskion was a breeding-ground for minor bureaucrats, for there was something in the temperament of urban, well-educated Hjorts that inclined them favorably toward becoming customs collectors and census-takers and building-inspectors and the like. Hjorts of a different sort lived in the valley of the Kulit that lay to the west of the city—people who were simpler folk in the main, villagers, farmers, who kept to themselves and patiently went about the business of raising such crops as grayven and ciderberries and garryn that they shipped to the populous cities of western Alhanroel.

  Just as the Hjorts of Santhiskion city were given by nature to painstaking list-making and record-keeping and report-writing, the rural Hjorts of the valley were lovers of ritual and ceremony. Their lives revolved around their farms and their produce; everywhere about them lurked invisible gods and demons and witches, who might be threats to the ripening fields; it was necessary constantly to propitiate the benevolent beings and to ward off the depredations of unfriendly ones by acting out the rites appropriate to the day of the year. In each village there was a certain official who kept the calendar of rites, and every morning announced the proper propitiations for the week ahead. Knowing how to keep the calendar was no easy matter; lengthy training was involved, and the calendar-keeper was revered for his skills the way a priest would be, or a surgeon.

  In the village of Abon Airair the calendar-keeper was named Erb Skonarij, a man so old that his pebbly-textured skin, once ashen-colored, had faded to a pale blue, and whose eyes, once splendidly huge and gleaming, now were dull and sunken into his forehead. But his mind was as alert as ever and he performed his immensely involuted calendrical tasks with undiminished accuracy.

  “This is the tenth day of Mapadik and the fourth day of Iyap and the ninth of Tjatur,” Erb Skonarij announced, when the elders of the village came to him in the morning to hear the day’s computations. “The demon Rangda Geyak is loose among us. Thus it is incumbent on us to perform the play of the contending geyaks this evening.” And the storyteller whose responsibility it was to narrate the play of the contending geyaks began at once to make ready for the show, for among the Hjorts of the Kulit Valley no distinction was made between ritual and drama.

  They had brought with them from their home world a complex calendar, or series of calendars, that bore no relation to the journey of Majipoor around its sun or to the movements of any other heavenly body: their year was 240 days long, divided into eight months of thirty days by the reckoning of one calendar, but also into twelve months of twenty days by a different reckoning, and likewise six months of forty days, twenty-four months of ten days, and 120 months of two days.

  Thus any given day of the year had five different dates in the five different calendars; and on certain special conjunctions of days, especially involving the months named Tjatur in the twelve-month calendar, Iyap in the eight-month calendar, and Mapadik in the twenty-four-month calendar, particularly important holy rites had to be celebrated. And this night the conjunction of dates was such that the rite of Ktut, the war between the demons, must be enacted.

  The people of Abon Airar began to gather by the storytellers’ mound at dusk, and by the time the sun had dropped behind Prezmyr Mountain the entire village was assembled, the musicians and actors were in place, the storyteller was perched atop his high seat. A great bonfire blazed in the fire pit. All eyes were on Erb Skonarij; and precisely at the moment when the hour known as Pasang Gjond arrived, he gave the signal to begin.

  “For many months now,” the storyteller sang, “the two factions of the geyaks have been at war…”

  The old, old story. Everyone knew it by heart.

  The musicians lifted their kempinongs and heftii and tjimpins and sounded the familiar melodies, and choristers with greatly distended throat-sacs brought forth the familiar repetitive bass drone that would continue unbroken throughout the performance, and the dancers, elaborately costumed, came forth to act out the dramatic events of the tale.

  “Great has been the sorrow of the village as the demons make war against each other,” sang the storyteller. “We have seen green flames darting by night among the gerribong trees. Blue flames have danced atop gravestones in the cemetery. White fla
mes move along our roof-beams. The harm to us has been great. Many of us have fallen ill, and children have died. The garryn we have gathered has been ruined. The fields of grayven are devastated. Harvest time is almost upon us and there will be no grayven to harvest. And all of this has befallen us because there is sin in the village, and the sinners have not given themselves over to be purified. The demon Rangda Geyak moves among us—”

  Rangda Geyak moved among them even as the storyteller spoke: a huge hideous figure costumed to look like an ancient female of the human kind, with a coarse mop of white hair and long, dangling breasts and great yellow crooked teeth that jutted like fangs. Red flames darted from her hair; yellow flames sprang from her fingertips. Back and forth she strode along the edge of the mound, menacing those who sat in the front rows.

  “But now, the sorcerer Tjal Goring Geyak comes, and does battle with her—”

  A second demon, this one a giant equipped with the four arms of a Skandar, pranced forward out of the shadows and confronted the first. Together now they danced in a circle, face to face, taunting each other and jeering, while the storyteller recited the details of their combat, telling how they hurled fiery trees at each other, and caused immense pits to open in the village square, and made the waters of the placid River Kulit surge above their banks and flood the town.

  The essence of the tale was that the contest of the geyaks brought great grief and woe to the village as it raged, for the demons were unconcerned by the incidental damage they were inflicting as they struggled up and down the town and the surrounding fields. Only when the sinners who had brought this calamity upon the townsfolk came forth to confess their crimes would the demons cease their warfare and turn against the evildoers, taking up flails and wielding them as weapons to drive them out of the village.