“Do you want to talk about it at all?” she asked gently, when some time had gone by in silence.
“No. I can’t. I can’t, Fulkari. These are high matters of state.”
Dekkeret had moved to the window now, and stood with his back to her, looking out into the night. All the mysterious beauty of Stoien city lay spread out before him, the slender buildings on their lofty brick pedestals, the variations of high and low, the artificial hills rising in the distance, the dazzling abundance of tropical vegetation. Fulkari, somewhere on the other side of the room, said nothing. He knew that he had wounded her with the sharpness of his words. She was his life’s companion, after all. She was not yet his wife, but she would be, whenever the pressures of this unexpected crisis relented long enough for a royal wedding to take place. And yet he had spoken to her as though she were some casual amusement of the evening, with whom it would be unthinkable to share the slightest detail of what had passed between the Pontifex and the Coronal. He realized that he was asking her to bear all the burdens of being the royal consort without making her privy to any of the daily challenges of his task.
He let a couple of moments go by.
Then he said, “All right. There’s really no sense in hiding it from you. Prestimion is so upset about this Mandralisca affair—this rebellion—that he intends to put it down by force. He’s talking about sending an army into Zimroel to crush it. Not even an ultimatum first, if I understood him correctly: just invade and attack.”
“And you disagree, is that it?”
Dekkeret swung around to face her. “Of course I disagree! Who would lead that army, do you think? Who’d be in charge of putting troops down in Piliplok and heading up the river to Ni-moya? It isn’t Prestimion who’ll be doing that, Fulkari. It isn’t Prestimion who’ll stand in front of the gates of Ni-moya and demand that they be thrown open, and who will have to smash them down if they’re not.”
She was regarding him now in a steady, level way. Her voice was calm as she said, “Of course. Such things would be the Coronal’s responsibility. I understand that.”
“And do you think the people of Zimroel are going to greet an invading army with open arms, and love and kisses?”
“It would be an ugly business, I agree, Dekkeret. But what choice is there? I know a little of what Dinitak’s been telling you—the helmet that this man Mandralisca uses, the things he does with it, the way he’s stirred up those five ghastly brothers to proclaim the independence of Zimroel. What else can the Pontifex do, in the face of open rebellion, but send an army in to straighten things out? And if there are casualties—well, how can that be helped? The commonwealth must be preserved.”
Now it was his turn to stare.
What he saw was a Fulkari that he had never fully seen before, the Lady Fulkari of Sipermit, a woman of high aristocratic pedigree, who traced her ancestry back through the generations to Lord Makhario. Of course she would see nothing wrong with putting down the Sambailid rebellion by the use of armed might. It came to him with the sudden force of revelation that after all these years of life at the Castle, even after having become Coronal himself, he was seeing for the first time, really seeing, the essential difference between the aristocrats of the Mount and a commoner like himself.
But he said nothing of that. He replied simply, “I don’t want to make war on Zimroel. I don’t want to kill innocent people, I don’t want to burn towns and villages, I don’t want to knock down the gates of Ni-moya.”
“And Mandralisca?”
“Must be stopped. Destroyed, to use Prestimion’s word. I have no quarrel with that. But I want to find some other way to bring it about, something short of waging total war against the people of Zimroel.” Dekkeret looked toward the sideboard and the remaining wine, but decided against taking a third bowl. “I’m going to send for Dinitak. I need to talk with him.”
“Now?” Fulkari asked, giving him a look of mock horror.
“He’ll have valuable things to say. He’s as close to a High Counsellor as anyone I have right now, Fulkari.”
“You also have me. And I give you this bit of high counsel: it’s two and a half hours now since we arrived in this place, or a little more, and we haven’t managed to find time to have anything to eat yet. Food is a good thing when one is hungry. Food is important. Food is a pleasing concept.”
“We’ll invite him in to join us, then.”
“No, Dekkeret! No.”
“What’s this? Do we have open defiance here?” he said, more amused by her audacity than annoyed.
Fulkari’s eyes also were flickering with a gleam of amusement. “That might be the word for it. Outside this room you are my Coronal Lord, yes, but in here—here—oh, Dekkeret, don’t be so foolish! You can’t be Coronal your every waking moment. Even a Coronal needs some rest, and we’ve been traveling all day. You’re too tired to think usefully about these things now, or to discuss them with Dinitak. I say let’s have dinner sent in, at long last. And then let’s go to bed.” A different sort of gleam entered her eye now. “Sleep on all this. Pray for a useful dream. You can talk to Dinitak in the morning.”
“But Prestimion is expecting—”
“Shush.” Her hand covered his mouth. She pressed herself close against him, and despite himself he slipped his arms around her and let himself melt into her embrace. Her lips rose to meet his. His hands traveled down the length of her smooth, slender back.
Fulkari is right, he thought. Nothing requires me to be Coronal my every waking moment.
Dinitak can wait. Prestimion can wait. And Mandralisca can wait as well.
In the night, as Dekkeret slept, fragments of memory came floating up out of the deep well of his spirit and went dancing about in his mind, stray bits and pieces out of the recent past that seemed to be trying to assemble themselves into some coherent whole.
—He is in Shabikant, kneeling before the two oracular trees, the ancient Trees of the Sun and the Moon. And from those trees comes the faintest of sounds, a far-off rusty grinding sound, as though the trees after the silence of ages are trying to muster their powers once more and speak out to the newly crowned king and tell him something he must know.
—He is in Kesmakuran, at the tomb of Dvorn the first Pontifex, this time kneeling before the ancient monarch’s great smiling statue, and the sweet hazy smoke of the herbs burning in the pit before him fills his lungs and invades his mind, and he closes his eyes and hears a voice within his head speaking in some strange wordless way, telling him, until it all dissolves into a meaningless boum, boum, boum, that he is destined to bring about great change, that he will work a transformation in the world nearly as great as that which was worked by Dvorn himself when he created the Pontificate.
—He is in the marketplace at Thilambaluc, he and Dinitak, and a tawdry marketplace astrologer is telling Dinitak’s fortune for a price of fifty weights, but the fortune-telling has hardly begun when the man’s eyes bulge with shock and alarm and he thrusts Dinitak’s coins back into his hands, claiming that he is unable to offer a prediction of his future and will not take his money, and runs swiftly away. “I don’t understand,” Dinitak says. “Am I so frightening? What did he see?”
—He has been wandering the Castle alone in the first days of his reign, and he is standing outside the judgment-hall that Lord Prestimion built, and the Su-Suheris magus Maundigand-Klimd comes upon him and asks for a private audience, and tells him that he has had a mysterious revelation in which he saw the Powers of the Realm gathered before the Confalume Throne to perform some ritual of high importance, but a mysterious fourth Power was present in the Su-Suheris’s vision along with the Pontifex and the Coronal and the Lady of the Isle. Dekkeret is perplexed by that, for how can there be a fourth Power of the Realm? And Maundigand-Klimd says, “I have one other detail to add, my lord.” The aura of that unknown fourth, the Su-Suheris declares, carries the imprint of a member of the Barjazid family.
In Dekkeret’s dreaming mind these fragmen
ts of memory drifted round and round and round again, until suddenly they were united into a single strand and the pattern came clear—the mysterious distant sound coming from the shifting roots of the oracular trees, the wordless words of the statue of the first Pontifex, the fear in the eyes of the marketplace astrologer, the revelation that had been visited upon Maundigand-Klimd—
Yes.
He sat upright, wide awake, as awake as he had ever been, heart pounding, sweat streaming from every pore.
“A fourth Power!” he cried. “A King of Dreams! Yes! Yes!”
Fulkari, lying beside him, stirred and opened her eyes. “Dekkeret?” she asked foggily. “What is it, Dekkeret? Is something wrong?”
“Up! Bathe yourself, dress, Fulkari! I need to speak with Dinitak immediately.”
“But it’s the middle of the night. You promised, Dekkeret—”
“I promised to sleep on it, and to pray for a useful dream. And so I have, and the dream has come. And brought me something that can’t wait until morning.” He was out of bed and searching for his robe. Fulkari was sitting up, now, blinking, rubbing her eyes, muttering to herself. He kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose and went out into the hall to find the steward of the night.
“Get me Dinitak Barjazid,” Dekkeret called. “I want him right away!”
It seemed to take no time at all for Dinitak to arrive. He was fully dressed and entirely awake. Dekkeret wondered whether he had been to sleep at all. Dinitak was such an ascetic in so many ways: sleep must seem a waste of time to him.
“I would have summoned you right after I met with Prestimion,” Dekkeret began, “but Fulkari was able to talk me into waiting until I had had a chance to rest a little while. It was just as well I did.”
Quickly he sketched for Dinitak a summary of his conference with Prestimion the night before. Dinitak seemed surprised at none of it, neither Prestimion’s unconcealed hatred for Mandralisca nor the Pontifex’s fierce desire to destroy the Sambailid rebellion by force of arms. It was, he said, exactly what one would expect of a man who had been tried by the Sambailid clan as the Pontifex Prestimion had been tried.
“I tell you bluntly, I detest the idea of going to war against Zimroel,” Dekkeret said. “The Lady Taliesme surely will be opposed to it also. I think Prestimion secretly feels the same way.”
“I suspect you may be right there. He has no love for war.”
“But he’s so troubled by the attacks on his own family that obliterating Mandralisca is his highest priority and he doesn’t care how the job gets done. Go to Zimroel, Dekkeret, he said to me. Take the biggest army you can. Set things to rights there. And destroy Mandralisca. War is what he means, Dinitak. It’s my hope that I can get him to soften his mind on this.”
“You will have a struggle there, I think.”
“I think so too. The Pontifex is not famous for his patience. He feels that his reign as Coronal was stained by the scheming of his enemies, and he believes, probably rightly, that this man Mandralisca has been behind most or perhaps all of the trouble. Now that trouble has burst out again, he wants to be rid of Mandralisca, once and for all. Well, who doesn’t? But war, to me, is a last resort. And I’d be the one who would have to command the troops, after all, not Prestimion.”
“That would not matter to him. You are the Coronal. The Pontifex decrees policy, and the Coronal carries out the decrees. It has always been thus.”
Dekkeret shrugged. “Nevertheless, if I can avoid this war, I will, Dinitak. I’ll go into Zimroel, yes. And I’ll see to it that Mandralisca’s days of troublemaking are brought to an end, just as Prestimion wants. It’s what happens after Mandralisca’s out of the picture that I want to discuss with you now.”
The bedroom door opened and Fulkari emerged, dressed in a handsome green morning robe. She gave Dinitak an amiable smile, as if to say that she saw nothing wrong with Dekkeret’s holding a policy conference at this hour of the night. Dekkeret threw her a grateful wink. Quietly she took a seat by the window. The first faint purplish streaks of dawn were visible in the east.
“Peacefully or otherwise,” Dekkeret said, “the Mandralisca problem has been solved, let us assume. The uprising of the five Sambailids has been curbed, and they’ve been made to see that they had better not get such ideas again. Without Mandralisca to do their thinking for them, they probably won’t. All right. The question that will remain, Dinitak, is this: what can we do to prevent future Mandraliscas from arising? He and his master Dantirya Sambail have given the world an entire generation of trouble. We can’t let anything like that happen again. And so—an idea, a very strange idea, in the middle of the night—”
13
“You are a duke?” the Shapeshifter asked, as Thastain led him from Mandralisca’s office. “Truly, a duke? You are so young to be a duke.”
Thastain grinned. “It amuses him to call me that. Or count, sometimes: he calls me that too. I’m not a duke or a count of anything, though. My father was a farmer in a place called Sennec, west of here. He died and we couldn’t pay the debts and we lost the farm, and I went into the service of the Five Lords.”
“But he calls you a duke,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. “You are a farmer’s son, and he calls you a duke. It is only a joke, you say. A strange joke, is what I think. It seems almost to be a kind of mockery. I do not understand human jokes. But, then, why should I? Am I in any way human?”
“Only in your appearance right now,” Thastain replied. “But of course that can change.—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will.”
I am having a polite conversation with a Metamorph, he thought, astounded. I just called him ‘sir’. Life held no end of amazements, it seemed.
As his meeting with Mandralisca ended, the ambassador from the Danipiur—for that was what he was, Thastain realized, the ambassador from the Shapeshifter queen—had reverted to his assumed human form for the journey back to his lodgings. So now he was a peculiar-looking long-legged man once again, who walked as though he had learned how to walk only last week and spoke with a thick buzzing accent that was a struggle for Thastain to penetrate. It seemed to him that Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp was almost as strange in pseudo-human guise as when he was wearing his own form.
Like any farm boy of northern Zimroel, Thastain had been raised to fear and loathe the Shapeshifters. They were the dread alien beings of the Piurifayne jungles to the southeast, who seethed with hatred over the loss of their world to human invaders thirteen thousand years before, and would never rest until they had somehow recaptured control of it. Though Lord Stiamot had confined them to their rain-forest reservation, everyone knew that their form-changing abilities made it possible for them to slip out of Piurifayne at will and go secretly among humans, working every manner of mischief: poisoning wells, stealing mounts and blaves, kidnapping babies to be raised as slaves in their jungle villages. Or so Thastain had grown up believing.
He had never spoken to a Metamorph before, not knowingly. He had never so much as seen one at close range. And now—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will. Wonder of wonders. Come this way, sir.
They emerged from the procuratorial palace into the clear, bright light of another perfect Ni-moyan day. The hostelry where Mandralisca kept his out-of-town visitors was a ten-minute walk away from the river—up the hill past the Movement headquarters and the apartment building where Thastain himself lived, turn left, enter an underground passageway that quickly turned into a broad stone staircase going up to the next level inland. And there was the hostelry, a great white tower, as most of the buildings of this sector of Ni-moya were, standing in a row of similar towers that formed a solid phalanx along the street known as Nissimorn Boulevard. Four of the Five Lords had mansions farther down Nissimorn Boulevard, where the apartment towers gave way to the private dwellings of the very wealthy. Everyone knew Nissimorn Boulevard. It was such a famous street that when he first saw it Thastain wondered if his feet would begin tingling as they
came in contact with its pavement.
“The Count Mandralisca makes jokes of you,” the Metamorph went on as they ascended the stone staircase, “but even so you are one of his most important people. Is that not so, that you are a close aide?”
“One of the closest. You saw the other two just now. Jacomin Halefice, Khaymak Barjazid, and I: we are his inner circle, the people he most trusts.” It was the truth, more or less, Thastain thought. The Count was more at ease with Halefice and Barjazid and him than with anyone else. He had told them things that he had kept secret from everyone all his life, about his childhood, his father, his service with Dantirya Sambail. That had to signify a certain closeness.
But Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp said, startling Thastain with the accuracy of his perception, “You are the people he most trusts, yes, but how much does he trust you? Or anyone? And how much do you trust him?”
“I can’t speak to any of that, sir.”
“He is a difficult man, I think, your Count Mandralisca. Proud, suspicious, dangerous. He offers us an alliance. He makes us promises.”
Thastain saw what was going on now. He maintained an uneasy silence.
The Shapeshifter said, “We have not done well by the promises of your people in the past. There were Pontifexes and Coronals who swore to make our lives better, to grant us this privilege and that one that had been taken from us by Lord Stiamot, to permit us to come forth freely from our lands. You see how we live now.”
“Count Mandralisca is neither a Pontifex nor a Coronal. The thing that he seeks is to free the people of this continent from the rule of such kings as those. He means all the people of this continent, your people included.”
“Perhaps so,” the Shapeshifter said. “And he is an honorable man, would you say, your Count Mandralisca?”
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