The King of Dreams

by Robert Silverberg

  “Yes. Oh, yes, Dekkeret, I know! But first—duty calls!” She brushed her lips lightly against his to tell him that she had made her peace with that, that she understood that a king’s pleasure must wait until a king’s work was done.

  Then she slipped from his grasp and held the door between their suites open for him, grinning, making little shooing gestures to send him off to his own place while she went about the task of dressing for the public events that lay ahead. He blew her a kiss and went through to get dressed himself: the royal robes in the green and gold colors emblematic of his high status, the ring, the pendant, all the little outward signs and symbols that marked him as king of the world.

  She has changed, he thought. She has grown into her role. We will be very happy together.

  But first, as Fulkari had said, duty called.

  It was late in the afternoon before all the public formalities of the royal visit to Shabikant were behind them—the mayor’s lunch at the town hall had turned out to be, of course, an interminable banquet attended by all the city’s notables, with speech after speech of welcome and expressions of hope for a long and glorious reign—and Dekkeret and Fulkari at last, accompanied by Dinitak and several of Dekkeret’s aides, were being conducted back down to the river to view Shabikant’s greatest attraction, the Trees of the Sun and the Moon.

  Mayor Kriskinnin Durch, almost beside himself with excitement, trotted along beside them. With him came half a dozen of the dignitaries who had been at the banquet, now wearing broad purple ribbons across their breasts that marked them, so the mayor explained, as officials of the priesthood of the trees. It was strictly an honorary distinction nowadays, he added: since the trees had been silent for thousands of years and the cult of their worship had fallen into disuse, the “priesthood” had in fact become a social society for the leading men of Shabikant.

  Fulkari, letting a little flash of wickedness go flickering across her face, claimed now to be having second thoughts about the visit. “Do you think this is so wise, Dekkeret? What if they decide to speak again, after all this time, and they tell you something you’d just as soon not have heard?”

  “I think the language of the trees has probably been forgotten by now, don’t you? But we can always opt not to hear the translation, if it hasn’t been. And if it’s a really bad prophecy the priests will surely pretend they can’t understand what the tree is saying, just as they did for Kolkalli.”

  Twilight was not far off now. The sun, bronzy green at this hour, hung low over the Haggito, and in these latitudes gave the illusion of being oddly broadened and flattened in the final moment of its nightly descent through the western sky.

  The trees were contained in a small oblong park at the river’s edge. A palisade of black metal posts terminating in sharp spikes protected them. They stood side by side, two solitary figures outlined against the darkening sky in an otherwise empty field.

  The mayor made a great show of unlocking the gate and ushering the guests from Castle Mount inside.

  “The Tree of the Sun is on the left,” he declared, in a tone throbbing with pride. “The Tree of the Moon is the one on the right.”

  The trees were myrobolans, Dekkeret realized, but they were by far the biggest ones he had ever seen, titans of their kind, and must surely be very ancient indeed. Very likely they had been strikingly impressive, too, back in Lord Kolkalli’s time.

  But it was easy to see that the two great trees were finally coming to the end of their days.

  The vivid, distinctive patterns of alternating green-and-white stripes that marked the trunks of healthy myrobolans had faded and collapsed on these two into blurry formless blotches, and the tall thick trunks themselves had developed alarming curvatures, the Tree of the Sun leaning distressingly off to the south, the Tree of the Moon going the other way. Their many-branched crowns were nearly bare, with only a scattering of crescent-shaped gray leaves to cover them. Soil erosion at the two trees’ bases had exposed their gnarled brown roots, though an attempt had been made to hide that by strewing the region around each tree with little banners and ribbons and heaps of talismans. The entire look of the place seemed sad, even pathetic, to Dekkeret.

  He and Fulkari had been provided with talismans of their own to contribute to the pile. Precisely at the moment of sunset they were supposed to go forward and offer them to the trees, which might then respond—here the mayor winked broadly—with oracular statements. Or, he said, they might not.

  The sun’s lower rim was just touching the river, now. It began to sink slowly into it. Dekkeret waited, picturing in his mind the immense mass of the world as it rolled ponderously onward along its axis, carrying this district inexorably into darkness. Now the sun was half-gone. And now nothing but the copper glint of its upper curve remained. Dekkeret held his breath. All conversation among the townsmen had ceased. The air suddenly seemed strangely still. There was a certain drama about all this, he had to admit.

  The mayor indicated with a nod that they should get ready to go forward in another moment.

  Dekkeret glanced at Fulkari and they advanced solemnly to the trees, he to the female tree, she to the male one, and knelt and added their talismans to the mounds just as the last glimmer of the sun vanished in the west. Dekkeret bowed his head. The mayor had instructed him to speak to the trees in the privacy of his heart and ask them for guidance.

  An intense silence ensued as the last light of day disappeared from the sky. No one in the group of townspeople standing behind them seemed even to be breathing.

  And in that silence Dekkeret, in astonishment, thought that he did indeed hear something—a rusty, grinding sound, so faint that it scarcely crossed the threshold of his hearing, a sound that might have been rising from the ground out of the roots of the tree before which he knelt. Was it the huge old tree swaying in the first breeze of evening? Or had the oracle—how could it be possible?—actually spoken, offering the new Coronal a couple of groaning syllables of unintelligible wisdom?

  He glanced again toward Fulkari. There was a strange look in her eyes, as if she had heard something too.

  But then Kriskinnin Durch broke the spell with a cheerful, robust clapping of his hands. “Well done, my lord, well done! The trees have welcomed your gifts, and have, I hope, imparted their wisdom to you! What an honor for us this is, after all these years, a Coronal paying homage to our marvelous trees! What a wonderful honor!”

  “You didn’t really hear anything, did you?” asked Fulkari in a low voice, as she and Dekkeret moved away.

  Had he? No. No. Of course not, he decided.

  “The murmuring of the wind is what I heard,” he said. “And maybe some shifting of the roots. But it’s all very dramatic, isn’t it? And spooky, even.”

  “Yes,” said Fulkari. “Spooky.”

  7

  “Sabers today?” Audhari asked, surprised, as he entered the gymnasium room where he and Keltryn held their twice-weekly fencing session. “You and I haven’t ever dueled with sabers before.”

  “We will today,” said Keltryn, in a voice tight and hard with anger.

  She had arrived at the fencing-hall five minutes early to select her weapon and make herself familiar with its greater length and heft. Septach Melayn had thought she was too light-framed to work with the saber. Probably he was right about that. She had tried it a couple of times without much show of aptitude, and he had excused her from saber drills thereafter.

  But she had no desire today for the elegant posing and prinking of rapier-work. Today she wanted the big weapon. She wanted to slash and bash and crash, to inflict damage and if necessary to be damaged herself. None of this had anything to do with Audhari. It was her boiling fury over Dinitak, mounting up and mounting up and mounting up until it overflowed within her, that drove her actions today.

  Keltryn had lost track by now of how many weeks it was since Dinitak had gone off into the west-country with the Coronal and Fulkari. Four weeks, was it? Five? She could not say. It seemed
like an eternity and a half. However long it was, it felt like a far longer span of time than her entire little romance with Dinitak had covered.

  It all seemed like nothing more than a dream, now, those few strange weeks with Dinitak. Before he came along she had guarded her body as though it were a temple and she were its high priestess. Then—she was not even sure why; had it been real physical attraction, or the impatience of her own maturing body, or even something as trivial as wanting to step forward finally into the kind of existence that her sister had had so long?—she had opened herself to Dinitak, and permitted him to penetrate in more senses than one the sanctuary of her self, and he had led her into realms of pleasure and excitement far beyond anything she had imagined in her virginal fantasies.

  But there had been more to it than sex, or so she had thought. For those few weeks she had ceased at last to think of herself as I and had begun to be a we.

  And then—as casually as though she were a worn-out garment—he had discarded her. Discarded. No other word applied, so far as she was concerned. To go jaunting off into the west-country like that with Dekkeret and Fulkari, and to leave her behind because it was—what had Fulkari told her?—because it was “politically inappropriate” for him to be accompanied by an unmarried woman while he was traveling in the Coronal’s entourage—

  It was hard to believe that any man in the early throes of a passionate love affair would take such a position. Dinitak was famous for his bluntness, for his rugged honesty: he was surely capable of speaking up even to Lord Dekkeret, telling him, “I’m sorry, your lordship, but if Keltryn doesn’t go, I don’t go either.”

  But he hadn’t said any such thing. She doubted that the Coronal would have been troubled in the slightest by her presence on the journey. It had been Dinitak’s idea to leave her behind, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s. How could he do such a thing? Keltryn asked herself. And the ugly answer came too fast: Because he’s grown tired of me already. I must be too eager, too demanding, too—young. And this is his way of dumping me.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Fulkari had said. “He’s crazy about you, Keltryn. I assure you, he hates leaving you at the Castle like this. But he’s just too prim to bring a young woman like you along with him on an official journey. He said it would be degrading to you, that it would make you seem like a concubine.”

  “A concubine!”

  “You know he has some extremely old-fashioned ideas.”

  “Not so old-fashioned that he wouldn’t sleep with me, Fulkari.”

  “You told me yourself that he seemed pretty hesitant even about that.”

  “Well—”

  Keltryn had to admit that Fulkari was right on that score. She had practically had to throw herself at Dinitak, that day at the pool, before he was willing at last to accept what she was offering. And even then there had been that odd reaction of dismay and chagrin, afterward, when he realized that she had given him her virginity. He is just too complicated for me, Keltryn had decided. But that did not help her get over her fury at being excluded from the west-country trip, or at being separated for so many weeks from the man she loved while their romance was still in its full early heat.

  In the days that followed her anger with him came and went. Sometimes she thought that she had ceased to care, that Dinitak had merely been a phase in her late adolescence that she would look back toward eventually with amusement and nostalgia. At such times she would feel entirely calm for hours at a stretch. But then she grew furious with him for having wrecked her life. She had given him more than her innocence, she told herself: she had given him her love. And he had thrown it mockingly back in her face.

  This was one of the angry days, today. Keltryn had dreamed a vivid dream of him, of the two of them together; she had imagined that he was in her bed beside her; she had reached hungrily for him, only to find herself alone. And had awakened in a red haze of frustration and rage.

  She would be fencing with Audhari this day. Sabers, she thought. Yes. Slash and bash and crash. Work the anger out of her system with some heavyweight swordplay.

  The tall freckle-faced young man from Stoienzar seemed baffled and bemused by her desire to use the big weapon. Not only was she inexperienced with it, but his advantage of height and strength would be enormously more significant with sabers than it was with rapiers or batons, where technique and quick reaction time mattered as much as simple force. But she would not be gainsaid.

  “On your guard!” she cried.

  “Remember, Keltryn, the saber uses the cutting edge as well as the point. And you have to protect your arm against—”

  She lowered her mask and let her eyes blaze at him. “Don’t condescend to me, Audhari. On your guard, I said!”

  It was an impossible match, though. The saber was a little too heavy for her slender arm. And she had only the sketchiest idea of the correct technique. She knew that the fencers had to keep farther apart than they did when using rapiers, but that meant it was impossible for her to reach him with a simple lunge. She had to resort to crude inelegant back-alley lateral swings that would surely have brought yelps of outrage from Septach Melayn had he been there to witness her performance.

  It was satisfying, in its way. It did allow her to vent some of her wrath. But what she was doing was not fencing at all. It had no style, no manner, no form. She would have accomplished just as much by grabbing up a hatchet and hacking up some firewood. Audhari, perplexed by her frantic assaults, had to abandon his own well-developed technique and parry whatever way he could. Whenever he intercepted the attack of her blade with his own, the collision sent an agonizing shiver of pain through Keltryn’s hand and arm. And finally he blocked one onslaught of hers so ringingly that her saber flew clattering to the floor.

  She knelt to pick her saber up and remained kneeling for a moment more, struggling to catch her breath.

  “What’s going on here today?” Audhari asked. He tossed his fencing mask aside and went closer to her. “You seem all worked up over something. Is it anything I’ve done?”

  “You? No—no, Audhari—”

  “Then what is it? You’ve chosen a weapon that’s obviously too heavy for you, and you’re swinging it around like a battle-axe instead of trying to fence properly with me. The best saber men deploy it almost like a rapier, you know. They go for lightness and speed, not for brute power.”

  “I suppose I’ll never be a good saber man, then,” she said sullenly, accenting the man. She was maskless now too.

  “That’s hardly anything to be ashamed of, though. Look, Keltryn, let’s forget this saber business and start over with something lighter, and—”

  “No. Wait.” She shut him up with an impatient wave of her hand. A new and strange thought was coming into her mind.

  It’s time to move on beyond Dinitak.

  Dinitak had served his purpose in her life. Whatever had existed between them was over and done with, as he was going to find out whenever he returned from his trip to the west-country. She didn’t need him any more. She would be a fool to go on pining as she had for a man who could abandon her so lightheartedly.

  To Audhari she said, “Maybe we should just forget about fencing this morning. There are other things we could be doing.”

  Her tone was sly but not ambiguous. Audhari looked at her uncomprehendingly, blinking as though she had spoken in the tongue of some other world. Keltryn stared straight into his eyes and gave him a hot, intense smile that she was certain he could interpret in only one way. Now it seemed that understanding was dawning in him.

  Her own boldness amazed her. But it was very pleasing to be doing this, and doing it all on her own initiative, without relying for once on Fulkari’s advice. She was glad now that Fulkari was away from the Castle. The time had come, she knew, for her to learn to make her own way through the whirlpools of life.

  “Come on, Audhari!” she cried. “Let’s go upstairs!”

  “Keltryn—”

  Audhari appeared total
ly astounded. He was bright red from the collar of his fencing jacket to the roots of his hair. His lips moved, but no reply emerged.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, finally. “You don’t want to, is that it?”

  He shook his head. “How weird you are this morning, Keltryn!”

  “I’m not attractive, is that it? Do you think I’m ugly? Do you, Audhari? I wouldn’t want to impose myself on a man who thinks I’m unattractive, you know.”

  All too obviously Audhari felt as though he would rather be in the depths of the Labyrinth right now than having this conversation. “You’re one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, Keltryn.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that that’s not enough. Whatever we did upstairs would be completely meaningless. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me, that way, and I’ve known it and I’ve respected it. Now you change your mind just like that? That isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. It feels like you just want to use me.”

  “And if I do, what of it? You can use me too. Would that be so terrible?”

  “I’m not like that, Keltryn. And it wouldn’t be any good. Any more than your trying to fence with a saber was.”

  Now it was her turn to look astounded. After all that she had heard while she was growing up about how men were nothing but mere monsters of lust, why was it her bad luck to keep running into ones who worried so much about morality and respectability and propriety? Why was it so difficult to find simple uncomplicated debauchery when she wanted some?

  Audhari, still red-faced, went on: “Please, can we just drop this talk, all right? Please. If you want to fence, let’s fence, and if not, not. But we’ve been such good friends for so long, and now—what you’re doing now is so damned confusing, Keltryn! I beg you, stop it. Just stop it.”

  She glowered at him. This was the last thing she would have expected. “Oh, I’m confusing you, am I? Well, then. I humbly beg you to forgive me for that,” she said frostily. “I’d never want to feel that I was guilty of having confused my dear sweet friend Audhari.”