The King of Dreams

by Robert Silverberg

  Prestimion held up one hand. “Enough! I beg you, Dekkeret, put aside the Power of the Realm part of this prophecy entirely. You’ve just ruled Dinitak out, and as for Khaymak Barjazid, I have as much trouble imagining him as Coronal as you would. Focus instead on Maundigand-Klimd’s warning that there will be difficulties in the early days of your reign, and that some Barjazid will be involved in them.”

  “I’m prepared to deal with whatever arises. First let it arise, though.”

  “You will remain alert, though?”

  “Of course I will. It should go without saying. But I will not take up arms against phantoms, for all that you tell me about the wisdom of your magus. And I tell you, Prestimion, I will be reluctant to take up arms at all, no matter what troubles may arise, if there’s a peaceful solution available to me.—Shall we drop this discussion now, Prestimion? We have our farewell dinner to prepare ourselves for.”

  “Yes. So we do.”

  In any case, Prestimion saw, there was no point in continuing this. It was clear to him that what he was trying to do was about as fruitful as butting his head against the great wall of Normork. Butt all you pleased; the wall would never yield. Neither would Dekkeret.

  Perhaps I am too sensitive on this, Prestimion thought, having had two doses of insurrection one upon another in the early years of my own reign. I am conditioned by my own unhappy experiences always to expect trouble; when it is absent, as it has been these many years since the death of Dantirya Sambail, I mistrust its absence. Dekkeret has a sunnier spirit: let him deal with Maundigand-Klimd’s gloomy prophecy as he pleases. Perhaps the Divine will indeed grant him a happy start to his reign despite everything. And dinner is waiting.

  11

  Khaymak Barjazid said, “I have a thought, your grace.—You mentioned, some time back, your difficult relationship with your father and your brothers.”

  Mandralisca shot him a startled, angry look. For the moment he had forgotten altogether that he had ever spoken of his painful childhood to Barjazid, or anyone else. And he was not at all accustomed to being addressed in a way that ventured to breach the walls he had erected around his inner life.

  “And if I did?” he said, in a voice tipped with blades.

  Barjazid squirmed. Terror came into the little man’s mismatched eyes. “I mean no offense, sir! No offense at all! Only that I see a way of intensifying the power of the helmet you hold in your hands, a way which would make use of—certain of your—experiences.”

  Mandralisca leaned forward. The sting of the sudden intrusion into his soul still reverberated in him, but he was interested all the same. “How so?”

  “Let me see how to put this,” said Barjazid carefully. He held himself like a man setting out to have a philosophical dialogue with a snarling, infuriated khulpoin, all yellow fangs and blazing eyes, that he has unexpectedly encountered on a quiet country road. “When one uses the helmet, one generates the power from within oneself,” said Barjazid. “It is my belief that one would be able to increase the device’s power if one were to draw on some reservoir of pain, of fury, of—I could almost say ‘hatred.’”

  “Well, say it, then. Hatred. It’s a word I understand.”

  “Hatred, yes. And so certain things occurred to me, sir, remembering what you had told me that day concerning your boyhood—your father. Your—early unhappiness—” Barjazid chose his words painstakingly, obviously aware that he was treading on dangerous ground here. He understood that Mandralisca might well not want to be reminded of the things that he had blurted out, so very much to his own surprise, that day that he and Barjazid and Jacomin Halefice were walking through the marketplace. But Mandralisca, controlling himself, signalled to him to go on. And Barjazid most artfully did: he hinted, he alluded, he talked in euphemisms, all the while painting the portrait of the boy Mandralisca eternally in fear of his savage drunken father and his blustering bullying brothers, suffering daily at their hands and storing up a full measure of loathing for them that would, one day, overflow upon the world. Loathing that could be turned into an asset, that could be harnessed, that could become a source of great power. And offered some suggestions concerning how that might be achieved.

  This was all very valuable. Mandralisca was grateful to Barjazid for sharing it with him. But he regretted, all the same, having parted even for a moment the veil that shrouded his early life. He had always found it useful to have the world perceive him as a monster carved out of ice; there were great risks in giving someone a glimpse of the vulnerable boy of long ago who lay hidden somewhere behind that chilly facade. He would gladly call back, if he could, all that he had told this little man that strange afternoon.

  “Enough,” Mandralisca said, finally. “You’ve made your point clear. Now go, and let me get down to work.” He reached for the helmet.

  Late autumn in the Gonghars, shading into early winter. The light but unending rain of the warm season has begun to give way to the cold and equally endless rain of autumn, heavy with sleet, that will yield in another few weeks to winter’s first snows. This is the cabin, the squalid shack, the tumbledown ill-favored house, where the wine-seller Kekkidis and his family live, here in the sad little mountain town of Ibykos. The hour is far along in the afternoon, dark, cold. Rain drums on the rotting lichen-encrusted roof and drips through the usual leaky places, landing in the usual buckets with a steady pong pong pong. Mandralisca does not dare to light a fire. Fuel is not wasted in this household, and any fuel not consumed on behalf of his father is deemed a waste of fuel; no one matters here but his father, and fires are lit when his father returns from his day’s toil, not before.

  Today that may be hours from now. Or, perhaps—the Divine willing—never.

  For three days now Kekkidis and his oldest son Malchio have been in the city of Velathys, a hundred miles away, arranging to buy up the stock of some fellow wine-merchant who has died in an avalanche, leaving half a dozen hungry babes. They are due back today; indeed, are already more than a little overdue, because the floater that runs between Velathys and Ibykos leaves at dawn and reaches Ibykos by mid-afternoon. It is almost dark, now, but the floater has not arrived. No one knows why. Another of Mandralisca’s brothers has been waiting at the station since noon with the wagon. The third is at the wine-shop, helping their mother. Mandralisca is alone at home. He diverts himself with luxurious fantasies of cataclysms befalling his father. Perhaps—perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!—something bad has happened on the road. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  His other way of passing the time, and keeping warm, is by practicing with the singlestick baton that he has carved from a piece of nightflower wood. That is the finest kind of baton, a nightflower-wood baton, and Mandralisca saved all last year, one square copper at a time, to buy himself a decent-sized stave, which he has whittled and whittled until it is of the perfect length and weight, and fits his hand so well that one might think a master craftsman had designed the hand grip. Now, holding the baton so that it rests lightly in his palm, he moves deftly back and forth through the room, feinting at shadows, jabbing, parrying. He is quick; he is good; his wrist is strong, his eye is keen; he hopes to be a champion some day. But right now he is mainly interested in keeping warm.

  He imagines that his opponent is his father. He dances round and round the older man, mockingly prodding at him, tapping him at the point of each shoulder, beneath the chin, along his cheek, playing with him, outmaneuvering him, humiliating him. Kekkidis has begun to growl with fury; he lashes out with his own baton with a two-handed grip, as though swinging an axe; but the boy is ten times as fast as he, and touches him again and again and again, while Kekkidis is unable to land a single blow.

  Perhaps Kekkidis will never come home at all. Perhaps he’ll die somewhere on the road. Let it be, Mandralisca prays, that he is already dead.

  Let him have had an avalanche too.

  The hills above Ibykos are snow-covered already, the wet heavy snow typical of the cusp of the season. Mandralisca, closing his eyes
, pictures the rain pounding down, imagines it striking the black granite bedrock, slicing at an angle into the accumulated snowdrifts, working like little knives to cut them loose and send them gliding in billowy clouds down the side of the hill toward the highway below, just as the Velathys floater goes by—hiding it altogether from sight until spring—Kekkidis and Malchio buried beneath a thousand tons of snow—

  Or let a sudden sinkhole open in the highway. Let the floater be swallowed up in it.

  Let the floater swerve wildly off the road. Let it plunge into the river.

  Let the engine die halfway between Velathys and here. Let them be caught in a blizzard and freeze to death.

  Mandralisca punctuates each of these hopeful thoughts with furious thrusts of his baton. Jab—jab—jab. He whirls, dances, turns lightly on the tips of his toes, strikes while his body is facing more than halfway away from his foe. Comes in overhead, a descending angle, impossible to defend against, bolt of lightning. Take that! That! That!

  The sound of the wagon pulling up, suddenly. Mandralisca wants to weep. No avalanche, no sinkhole, no fatal blizzard. Kekkidis is home again.

  Voices. Footsteps outside, now. Coughing sounds. Someone stamping his feet, two someones, Kekkidis and Malchio knocking snow off their boots.

  “Boy! Where are you, boy? Let us in! Do you have any idea how cold it is out here?”

  Mandralisca leans his baton against the wall. Rushes to the door, fumbles with the latch. Two tall men on the threshold, one older than the other, two bleak scowling lantern-jawed faces, long greasy black hair, angry eyes shining through. Mandralisca can smell the brandy on their breath. There is the smell of fury about them, too: a sharp, musky stink, boiling out from beneath their fur robes. Something must have gone wrong. They stomp past him, brushing him aside. “Where’s the fire?” Kekkidis asks. “Why is it so damnably cold in here? You should have had a fire ready for us, boy!”

  No way to deal with that. Denounced if he prepares a fire, denounced if he doesn’t. The old story.

  Mandralisca hurries to bring in some kindling from the pile on the back porch. His father and his brother, still in their coats, stand in the middle of the room, rubbing their hands to warm them. They are talking about their journey. Their voices are harsh and bitter. Evidently the venture has been a failure; the agents for the other wine-merchant’s estate have been too sharp for Kekkidis, the cheap and easy purchase of distress-sale merchandise has fallen through, the whole trip has been a waste of time and money. Mandralisca keeps his head down and goes about his business, asking no questions. He knows better than to call attention to himself when his father is in a mood like this. Best to stay out of his way, cling to the shadows, let him vent his rage on pots and pans and stools, not on his youngest son.

  But it happens anyway. Mandralisca is half a step too slow performing some task. Kekkidis is displeased. He snarls, curses, abruptly sees Mandralisca’s baton leaning against the wall not far from where he stands, grabs it up, prods the boy sharply in the gut with its tip.

  That is unbearable. Not so much the pain of being prodded by the baton, although it nearly takes his breath away, but that his father should be handling his baton at all. Kekkidis has no business touching it, let alone using it against him. The baton is his. His only possession. Bought with his own money, carved into shape with his own hands.

  Without stopping to think, Mandralisca reaches out for it as Kekkidis is drawing it back for a second thrust. Lightning-fast, he steps forward, seizes the baton by the tip, pulls it toward him, trying to yank it from his father’s hand.

  It is a terrible mistake. He knows that even as he is committing it, but for all his quickness he is unable to stop himself. Kekkidis stares at him, wild-eyed, sputtering with astonishment at so flagrant an act of defiance. He rips the baton from Mandralisca’s grasp, twisting laterally with vicious force that Mandralisca’s slender wrist cannot resist. Grabs the baton by each end, grinning, snaps it easily over his knee, grins again, holds the broken pieces up to display them for him, and casually tosses them into the fire. All of it takes only a moment or two to accomplish.

  “No,” Mandralisca murmurs, not yet believing it has happened. “Don’t—no—please—”

  A year’s savings. His beautiful baton.

  Thirty-five years later and a thousand miles or so to the north and east, the man who calls himself Count Mandralisca of Zimroel sits in a small circular room with an arched roof and burnt-orange mud-plastered walls on a ridge overlooking the desert wastes of the Plain of Whips. He wears a helmet of metal mesh on his brow; his hands are clenched beside him as though each one grips one of the sundered halves of the broken baton.

  He sees his father’s face before him. The triumphant vindictive grin. The pieces of the baton held aloft—tossed into the flames—

  Mandralisca’s searching mind soars upward—outward—remembering—hating—

  Don’t—no—please—

  Teotas, defeated by sleep yet again, sleeps. He can do nothing else. His spirit fears sleep but his body demands it. Each night he fights, loses, succumbs. And so now, despite the nightly struggle, once more he lies sleeping. Dreaming.

  A desert, somewhere, nowhere real. Hallucinations rise like heat waves from the rocks. He hears groans and occasional sobs and something that could be a chorus of large black beetles, a dry rustling sound. The wind is hot and dusty. The dawn has a blinding brilliance. The rocks are bright nodes of pure energy whose rich-textured red surfaces vibrate in patterns that continually change. On one face of every stony mass he sees golden lights circling gracefully. On the opposite face pale bluish spheres are unceasingly born and go bubbling into the air. Everything shimmers. Everything shines with an inner light. It would all be marvelously beautiful, if it were not so frightening.

  He himself has been transformed into something hideous. His hands have become hammers. His toes are hooked claws. His knees have eyes but no eyebrows. His tongue is satin. His saliva is glass. His blood is bile and his bile is blood. A brooding sense of imminent punishment assails him. Creatures made of vertical ribs of gray cartilage make dull booming noises at him. Somehow he understands their meaning: they are expressing their scorn, they are mocking him for his innumerable inadequacies. He wants to cry out, but no sound will leave his throat. Nor can he flee the scene. He is paralyzed.

  “Fi—o—rin—da—”

  With a supreme effort he manages to utter her name. Can she hear him? Will she save him?

  “Fi—o—rin—da—”

  He plucks at the twisted and disheveled coverlet. Fiorinda lies beside him like someone’s discarded life-size doll, cut off from him behind the wall of sleep—he knows she’s there, can’t reach out to her, can’t make any sort of contact. One of them is on some other world. He has no way of telling which of them it is. Probably me, he decides. Yes. He is on another world, asleep, dreaming, dreaming that he lies in his bed in the Castle, asleep, next to the sleeping Fiorinda, who is beyond his reach. And he is dreaming.

  “Fiorinda?”

  Silence. Solitude.

  He realizes now that he must be dreaming that he is awake. He sits up, reaches for the night-light. By its faint green glow he sees that he is alone in the bed. He remembers, now: Fiorinda has gone to the Labyrinth with Varaile, not a permanent separation, only a postponement of the decision, a short visit to help Varaile get herself established in her new home. And then they will decide which one of them is to take the position that has been offered, whether Fiorinda is to be lady-in-waiting to the wife of the new Pontifex or he to be High Counsellor to Lord Dekkeret. But how can he be High Counsellor, when he is nothing more than the most loathsome of insects?

  Meanwhile he is alone at the Castle. Assailed by merciless dreams.

  Night after night…terror. Madness. Where can he hide? Nowhere. There is no place to hide. Nowhere. Nowhere.

  “Do you hear something?” Varaile asked. “One of the children crying, perhaps?”

  “What?
What?”

  “Wake up, Prestimion! One of the children—”

  He made a further interrogative noise, but showed no sign of being willing to awaken. After a moment Varaile realized that there was no reason why he should. The hour was very late. He was exhausted; since their arrival at the Labyrinth his days, and many of his nights as well, had been taken up in meetings, conferences, discussions. The officials of the departed Confalume’s Pontificate had to be interviewed and assessed, the new people that Prestimion had brought with him from the Castle had to be integrated into the system here, there were applications for favor to study, petitions to grant—

  Let him sleep, Varaile thought. This was something she could handle by herself.

  And there it came again: a weird throttled sound that seemed to be trying to be a shriek, but was emerging instead as a moan. From its pitch, she thought she recognized the voice as that of Simbilon, who although he was nearly eleven still had a clear, pure contralto. So it was to his room that she went first, making her way uncertainly through the bewildering complex of rooms that was the imperial residence. A bobbing globe of orange slave-light drifted just overhead, illuminating her path.

  But Simbilon lay sleeping peacefully amidst his clutter of books, a dozen or more scattered all around him on the bed and one still open, the pages flattened across his chest where the book had fallen when sleep overtook him. Varaile lifted it from him and set it beside his pillow, and went from the room.

  The strange sound came to her again, more urgent, now. It frightened her to think that one of her children might be making a sound like that. Hastily she crossed the hall and entered the room where Tuanelys slept in a tumbled heap of stuffed animals, her bed mounded high with furry blaves and sigimoins and bilantoons and canavongs and ghalvars, and even a long-nosed manculain, her current favorite, transformed by the maker’s hand into something cuddly and charming, though the real manculains of the jungles of Stoienzar, covered all over by poisonous yellow spines, were as far from cuddly as animals could be.