It was a time when the science of such biological miracles was still understood on Majipoor. The efforts of Lord Havilbove’s technicians met with gratifying success. The plants intended for his garden achieved a perfect symmetry as they grew, and when they reached a size that was appropriate in relationship to the plants about them, they held that size ever after.
Superfluous leaves and even whole unnecessary boughs dropped away automatically, and quickly crumbled into a compost that enhanced the fertility of the lava soil. Enzymes in their roots suppressed the growth of weeds. Every plant bore flowers, but the seeds that those flowers produced were sterile; only when a plant reached the natural end of its life cycle did it bring forth fertile ones, so that it could replace itself with another that soon would have the same size and form. Thus the garden remained in unchanging balance.
Whenever he learned of a beautiful tree or shrub anywhere in the world, Lord Havilbove sent for specimens of it, with roots and soil attached, and gave them to the genetic surgeons of the Castle so that they could be modified for self-maintenance. Truckloads of bright-hued ornamental minerals came to the garden also—the yellowish-green stone known as chrysocolla, and the blue one called heart-of-azure, and red cinnabar, and golden crusca, and dozens more. Each of these was used as a ground cover in a different level of the garden, the differing colors being deployed by Havilbove with a painter’s eye, so that as one stood upon the peak at Bibiroon Sweep and looked down over the entirety of the garden one saw a great splash of pale crimson here, and one of vivid yellow there, and zones of scarlet, and blue, and green, all of them with plantings complementary to the color of the ground.
Lord Havilbove’s successor, Lord Kanaba, was equally devoted to the garden, and Lord Sirruth, who came after him, was sympathetic enough to it to keep its staff in place and even expand its budget. Then came the Coronal Lord Thraym, who was at first preoccupied with ambitious building projects of his own at the Castle, but who was smitten with love for Lord Havilbove’s garden upon his first visit there. He saw to it that funds were provided to carry it to its final state of perfection. Thus it took a century or more to bring the great garden into being; but then it remained ever after as one of the treasures of the Mount, a famed sight that every inhabitant of Majipoor yearned to have the privilege of beholding at least once.
Dumafice Moal had been born in Dundilmir, just downslope from the garden’s lower tip, and from boyhood on he visited it at every opportunity he had. He never doubted that it was his destiny to be part of the garden’s staff; and now, at the age of sixty, he had more than forty years of devoted service behind him.
Self-maintaining though the garden was, it nevertheless required a staff of considerable size. Millions of people visited the garden every year; a certain amount of damage was unavoidable; paths and fountains had to be repaired, ornamental plazas tidied, stolen plants replaced. Nor was the garden safe from marauding animals that came in from outside. There was plenty of open space on Castle Mount in the districts between the Fifty Cities, where wild creatures still thrived. The forested slopes of the Mount teemed with beasts of many kinds, from hryssa-wolves and jakkaboles and slinking long-fanged noomanossi to such lesser creatures as sigimoins and mintuns and beady-eyed droles. Jakkaboles and hryssa-wolves, dangerous things that they were, posed no threat to the elegant plantings. But a pack of little burrowing droles, poking their long toothy snouts into the ground in search of grubs, could uproot an entire bed of eldirons or tanigales between midnight and dawn. An infestation of tentworms could spread ugly canopies of coarse silk over half a mile of blooming thwales and swiftly reduce the plants to naked stubs. A flock of hungry vulgises settling in the treetops to build their nests—or a swarm of ganganels—spotted cujus—
So it was Dumafice Moal’s daily task to patrol the garden from sunrise onward, searching out the enemies of the plants. It was constant warfare. For a weapon he carried a long-handled energy-thrower, tuned to its lowest power; and when he came upon some work of destruction in progress, he would apply just enough heat to drive out the forces of destruction without damaging the plantings themselves.
“Often it starts very inconspicuously,” he told his nephew. “A trace of upturned soil leads you to a tiny parade of little red insects, and if you follow along it you discover a small mound, something that a visitor wouldn’t give a second look to—but those of us who know what to look for understand that these are the hatchlings of the harpilan beetle, which, if left to its own devices for long, will—ah—see here, boy—”
He poked at the border of a row of Bailemoona khemibors with the tip of his energy-thrower. “Do you see it, Theriax—right there—?”
The boy shook his head. The boy, Dumafice Moal was beginning to believe, was not particularly observant.
He was his youngest sister’s child, from Canzilaine, virtually at the foot of the Mount. Dumafice Moal himself had never married—his devotion was to the garden—but he came from a large family, brothers and sisters and cousins scattered from Bibiroon and Sikkal down the Mount to Amblemorn, Dundilmir, and several other of the Slope Cities. From time to time some relative of his would come to see the garden. Dumafice Moal liked to take them on private tours, early in the day before the gates were open to the public, while he was making his morning rounds.
The khemibors were a southern species with bright blue flowers and glossy leaves of the same color, and they had been planted in beds of vivid orange rock, to wondrous visual effect. Dumafice Moal’s practiced eye had noted a certain dulling of the gleaming surfaces of the leaves of the plants closest to the path: a sure sign that himmis-bugs had taken up residence on their undersides. He slipped his energy-thrower under the nearest row, checking its adjustment slide carefully to make certain that the power was switched to the lowest level.
“Himmis-bugs,” he said, pointing. “We used to spray for them, but it never did much good. So we cook them instead. Watch how I proceed to make things hot for the little vermin.”
Just as he began to move the long rod about, a curious sensation at the back of his skull started to afflict him.
It was a very odd thing. It was somewhat like an itch, though not quite. He felt a mild warmth back there, and then something not so mild. A sharp stinging pain, then, as if some disagreeable insect were attacking him. But when he brushed the back of his head with his free hand he detected nothing.
He continued to prod the soil beneath the khemibors with his energy-thrower. The stinging sensation grew more intense. It became a fierce burning feeling now, highly localized—like a hot beam of light focused on a single point of his head, drilling, trying to cut its way through—
“Theriax?” he said, lurching, nearly falling.
“Uncle? Are you all right?”
The boy reached out to steady him. Dumafice Moal shrugged him away. He was beginning to feel a different sort of pain: an inward one, a bewildering distress that he could only describe to himself as a pain of the soul. A sense of his own inadequacy, of having performed his lifelong tasks poorly, of having failed the garden.
How odd, he thought. I always worked so hard.
But there was no hiding from the feeling of shame that now was pervading every corner of his spirit. It engulfed him entirely; he was sinking into it as into a dark deep pit, an abyss of guilt.
“Uncle?” the boy said, from very far away. “Uncle, I think you may be burning the—”
“Hush. Let me be.”
He saw only too clearly how poorly he had done his work. The garden was hopelessly infested with ravenous enemies. Pests of all sorts lurked everywhere: blights, molds, rusts, murrains, chewing creatures, sucking creatures, chafing creatures, burrowing creatures, biting creatures. Swarms of flies, clouds of gnats, armies of beetles, legions of worms. The thunderous sound of a billion tiny jaws chomping at once roared in his ears. Wherever he looked he saw more of them, and even more on the way: eggs, cocoons, nests, preparing to release new predators by the millions. And all o
f it his fault—his—his—
They all must burn.
“Uncle?”
Burn! Burn!
Dumafice Moal turned the energy-thrower to a higher level, and a higher one still. A dull rosy glow sprang up in the bed of khemibors. Burn! Let the himmis-bugs cope with that! He went quickly from row to row, from bed to bed, from terrace to terrace. Spirals of greasy blue smoke began to rise from newly created heaps of ash. The trunks of trees were turning black with the scars of combustion. Vines hung in angular, disheveled loops.
There was much to do. It was his duty to purify the garden, all of it, here and now. He would work at it all day, and far into the night if necessary, and onward to the following dawn. How else could he cope with the unbearable burden of guilt that roiled the deepest recesses of his soul?
He moved on and on, torching this, blasting that. Clouds of ash now leaped up with every step he took. Black haze veiled the morning sun. An acrid carbonized taste invaded his nostrils. The boy followed along behind him, astounded, dumbstruck.
Someone was calling down to him from a higher terrace: “Dumafice Moal, have you gone insane? Stop it! Stop!”
“I must,” he called back. “The garden is shameful to me. I have failed in my duties.”
Sparks were flying all around, now. Trees blossomed into bright flame. Here and there, huge blazing limbs broke free and toppled, shrouded in red, into the plantings below. He was aware that he was doing some damage to the gardens, but not nearly so much as these insects and animals and fungoid pests had achieved. And it was necessary damage, purgative damage. Only through fire could the garden be purified—could he be absolved of his shame—
He went on, beyond the alluailes and the flask-trees, deep into the navindombe bushes now. Behind him rose a dark, red-flecked mist of smoking embers. He aimed the energy-thrower here, here, here. Trees crashed in the distance. Enormous boughs landed with the soft sighing impact of wood that has burned from the inside out: dream-branches, dream-light. Cinders crunched underfoot. The ash was a thick, soft black powder that rose in choking puffs. The sky was turning red. A savage gloom prevailed everywhere. He no longer felt the pain at the top of his skull, no longer felt the guilt, even, of his failure—only the joy of what he was achieving now, the triumph of having restored purity to what had become impure, of having negated negation.
Angry voices cried out behind him.
He turned. He saw stunned faces, goggling eyes.
“Do you see?” he asked them proudly. “How much better it all is, now?”
“What have you done, Dumafice Moal?”
They came rushing through the cinder-beds toward him. Seized him by the arms. Threw him down, bound him hand and foot, while all the while he protested that his work was still unfinished, that much remained yet to be done, that he could not rest until he had saved the entire garden from its foes.
5
Word was beginning to spread up and down Castle Mount and outward into the lands beyond: the old Pontifex Confalume was dead, Lord Prestimion had gone to the Labyrinth to take the senior throne, Prince Dekkeret of Normork was to become the new Coronal. Already the portraits of the late Pontifex were being brought out of storage and put on display, bedecked now with the yellow streamers of mourning: Confalume as a vigorous young lord with bright keen eyes and a thick sweep of chestnut hair, Confalume the beloved gray-haired Coronal, Confalume the regal old Pontifex of the past two decades, whatever people could lay their hands on. Soon portraits of the new Lord Dekkeret would be generally available, and they would go up too on every wall and in every window, and, alongside them, pictures of the former Lord Prestimion, now Prestimion Pontifex, wearing the scarlet-and-black robes of his newly assumed high office.
Everywhere, preparations for great celebrations were getting under way: festivals, parades, pyrotechnic displays, tournaments, a worldwide holiday of joy. The arrival of a new Coronal on the scene was something of a novelty for modern-day Majipoor.
Over the thirteen thousand years of Majipoor’s history it normally happened only two or three times in a person’s life that a Pontifex died and new rulers came to the two capitals. But in the past century a change of monarchs had been even more of a rarity than that. Confalume had been Pontifex for the past twenty years, and Coronal for the forty-three before that. So more than sixty years had gone by since the Pontifex Gobryas had died and was succeeded by the dashing young Lord Prankipin, who had chosen Prince Confalume to be his Coronal; and very few were still alive who remembered that day. Prankipin himself, dead some twenty years now, was only a name to the billions of younger folk who had come into the world during the Pontificate of Confalume.
The new Lord Dekkeret was not widely known outside the confines of the Castle—new Coronals rarely were—but everyone knew that he was a close and trusted associate of Lord Prestimion, and that was good enough. Lord Prestimion, like Lord Confalume before him, had been a greatly beloved Coronal, and there was general faith that he would choose a successor wisely and well.
Most people were aware that Dekkeret was of common birth, a young man of Normork who had first come to the attention of Lord Prestimion by thwarting an attempt on the Coronal’s life, back at the beginning of Prestimion’s reign. That was a most unusual thing, a commoner chosen to be Coronal, but it did happen every few hundred years. They knew that Dekkeret was a man of imposing stature and lordly mien, sturdy and handsome. Those who had had any contact with him in his travels through the world in his years as Prestimion’s designated heir had discovered that he was good-natured and easy of spirit, a man of open heart and generous soul. More than that, what sort of Coronal he would be, they would learn soon enough. Prestimion, throughout his years as king, had often left the Mount to visit cities far and wide. Very likely Dekkeret would do the same.
In the city of Ertsud Grand, midway up Castle Mount, the custodians of the Summer Palace began to make plans for an early visit by the new Coronal to the auxiliary residence that was maintained there for his use.
At this point such talk was, they knew, mainly wishful thinking. Ertsud Grand, a city of nine million people in the circle of the Mount known as the Guardian Cities, had been a favorite secondary residence of Coronals for centuries; but Lord Gobryas, who had come to the throne almost ninety years ago, had been the last one to make any regular use of the beautiful dwelling that was set aside for him there. Lord Prankipin had visited the Summer Palace no more than half a dozen times in his twenty years on the Mount. Lord Confalume, though, had gone there only twice in a reign two times as long. As for Lord Prestimion, he had never been to Ertsud Grand at all, and seemed altogether unaware that the Summer Palace existed.
Yet it was a beautiful palace in a beautiful city. Ertsud Grand was known as the City of Eight Thousand Bridges, though its citizens would always tell wondering visitors, “Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Probably there are no more than seven or eight hundred.” Streams from three sides of the Mount met and mingled there, providing the city with a watery underbedding before draining downward to create the Huyn River, one of the six that descended the slopes of Castle Mount.
A network of canals connected the various sectors of Ertsud Grand, so that it was possible to go all about the city by boat. All the main canals flowed toward the Central Market—which in fact was in the eastern half of the city, rather than being truly central—where, in a gigantic cobblestoned plaza bordered by tall warehouses of white stone, luxury goods from every part of Majipoor were bought and sold. Here were dealers in unusual meats and fishes, in exotic spices, in voluptuous furs from the cold northern marches of Zimroel, in the green pearls of the tropical Rodamaunt Archipelago and the transparent topaz that was mined by night at Zeberged, in the wines of a hundred regions, in the small animals and strange insects that the people of Ertsud Grand favored as pets, and much more besides.
To provide the western sector of the city with a focal point that would be as important an attraction in its way as the Central Market w
as on the eastern side, the ancient planners of Ertsud Grand had dammed up half a dozen of the larger streams, creating the body of water known as the Great Lake. It was perfectly circular and a rich sapphire blue in color, ten miles in circumference and glinting like a giant mirror in the midday sun. All around its shores were the palaces and mansions of wealthy merchants and the city’s nobility, and a host of pleasure-pavilions and sporting parlors. Boats and flat-bottomed barges of the most elaborate sort, painted in bright colors, went back and forth among these buildings all day long.
The Summer Palace, the masterwork of the long-ago and otherwise forgotten Lord Kassarn, was situated on a large artificial island in the Great Lake’s precise center. It was, in fact, two palaces, one within another: an outer one made of pink marble and an inner one fashioned entirely of bamboo canes.
The marble palace was a kind of habitable continuous wall: a joined series of pavilions, their roofs supported by columns inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, with a multitude of apartments and colonnaded cloisters and banquet-halls and courtyards. The guest rooms—there were scores of them, spacious and airy—were decorated with fanciful murals of the lives of the early Coronal Lords. Here, once upon a time, Coronals seeking respite from the routines of the daily business of the Castle would come in summer to hold court and give lavish feasts for their chief lords, the nobility of the cities of the Mount, and visiting dignitaries.
Within this ringlike marble building, which occupied the entire perimeter of the island, was an extensive park where wild animals of many sorts were allowed to roam—gibizongs, plaars, semboks and dimilions, shy and dainty bilantoons, prancing spiral-horned gambulons, small furry krefts that ran around like animated balls of fluff with stiff upraised tails, and a herd of fifty white kibrils whose red eyes blazed in their broad foreheads like huge rubies. And at the very heart of the park was the Summer Palace proper, intended as the Coronal’s private refuge.
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