Within it lay Princess Thismet now, taking her ease in the great glossy tub of porphyry inlaid with patterns of wine-yellow topaz that stood at the center of her bathchamber. From the smooth tubes of green onyx that were its spigots ran a steady pale pink stream of heated water, the fragrant and silken water of far-off Lake Embolain, carried across two thousand miles of marble piping for the pleasure of the guests of the Pontifex. A triple pair of iridescent green lamps hung above her. The princess lay prettily disposed, breast-deep in the tub with her arms hanging relaxed over its curving rim, so that the two serving-women who knelt just to either side of it could carry out their nightly task of caring for her hands and fingers, the flawless elongated nails of which were enameled afresh each evening in a gleaming platinum hue. Behind her, gently kneading the slender column of her neck, was the Princess Thismet’s chief lady-of-honor, Melithyrrh of Amblemorn, her companion since childhood, a woman as fair as Thismet was dark, with a great swirl of golden hair and pale cheeks lightly dappled with a perpetual fine blush.
Usually she and Thismet chattered endlessly; but tonight thus far very little had been said, and that with long periods of silence between each remark. After one of these Melithyrrh said, “The muscles of your back are very tense tonight, lady.”
“When I had my rest this afternoon I dreamed, and the dream stays with me and grips me all along my spine.”
“It must not have been a very beguiling dream.”
To this the Princess Thismet offered no reply.
“A sending of some sort?” asked Melithyrrh, after a few moments more.
“A dream,” said Thismet shortly. “Only a dream. Dig your fingers more deeply into my shoulders, would you, good Melithyrrh?”
Again there was silence, while Melithyrrh steadily worked. Thismet closed her eyes and let her head loll backward. Her body was a slender one, sinewy for a woman’s, and the muscles lay close to the surface: often, when she had dreamed a disturbing dream, they were knotted and painful for long hours thereafter.
She was Prince Korsibar’s twin, born only a few minutes after him, and the kinship between them showed in her shining ebony hair and dark glittering eyes, her prominent sharp-edged cheekbones, her full lips and strong chin, and in the long-limbed proportions of her frame. But whereas Korsibar was a man of towering height, the Lady Thismet was cut to a smaller scale, having her brother’s rangy proportions but nothing like his size, and where his skin was leathery and blackened by long exposure to fierce sunlight, hers was extraordinarily smooth and had the stark whiteness of one who lived only by night. Her whole appearance was one of great delicacy of form and almost a sort of boyishness, other than in the fullness of her breasts and the womanly breadth of her hips.
A third serving-maid entered the chamber and said, “The magus Sanibak-Thastimoon is outside, saying he has been urgently summoned, and asks to be admitted. Shall I show him in?”
Melithyrrh laughed. “Has he lost his mind? Have you? Milady is in her bath.”
The girl reddened and stammered something inaudible.
Icily, Thismet said, “I requested his immediate presence, Melithyrrh.”
“Surely you didn’t intend—”
“Immediate,” she said. “Am I required by you to maintain my modesty in front of creatures of every sort, Melithyrrh, even those who could never feel desire for women of the human kind? Let him come in.”
“Indeed,” said Melithyrrh with ostentatious cheeriness, signaling to the serving-maid. The Su-Suheris appeared almost at once, a thin, tall, sharp-angled figure tightly wrapped in a rigid sheathlike tunic of orange parchment bedecked with shining blue beads, from which his pair of narrow emerald-eyed heads jutted like twin conning-towers. He took up a position just to the left of the massive porphyry tub, and, though he was looking down directly at Thismet’s clearly revealed nakedness, he displayed no more interest in it than he did in the tub itself.
“Lady?” he said.
“I need your guidance, Sanibak-Thastimoon, in a certain delicate matter. I hope I can rely upon you. And on your discretion.”
From the leftmost head came a quick, barely perceptible nod.
She went on, “You told me once, not long ago, that I was destined for great things—though whether they were great good things or great bad things, you could not or would not say.”
“Could not, my lady,” said the Su-Suheris. The voice that spoke was the crisp and precisely inflected one of the necromancer’s right head.
“Could not. Very well. The omens were ambiguous, as such omens all too often are. You told me also that you could see the same ambiguous kind of greatness in my brother’s future.”
Again Sanibak-Thastimoon briefly nodded, both heads at once.
“This afternoon,” Princess Thismet said, “I had a strange dark dream. Perhaps you can speak it for me, Sanibak-Thastimoon. I dreamed that I was home again, that I had somehow returned to the Castle; but I was in some part of the Castle that was unknown to me, on the northern side where almost nobody ever goes. It seemed to me that I was wandering across a broad platform of badly chipped brick that led to a dismal half-ruined wall, and thence to a kind of parapet that gave me a view out to such towns as Huine and Gossif, and whatever city may be beyond those—Tentag, I suppose. There I was, anyhow, in this old and crumbling corner of the Castle, looking outward to cities I had never visited and then in toward the summit of the Mount rising high above me, and wondering how I was ever going to find my way toward those parts of the building where I knew my way around.”
She fell silent, and stared at the ceiling of the bathchamber, where an ornate frieze of interwoven flowers and leaves and stalks, eldiron blossoms and tanigales and big fleshy shepitholes, had been carved from sleek curving slabs of sapphire targolite and pale chalcedony.
“Yes, lady?” said Sanibak-Thastimoon, waiting.
Through the Lady Thismet’s mind a thousand turbulent images flowed. She saw herself running to and fro on that somber balcony at the edge of the immense sprawling Castle atop the mightiest mountain of Majipoor—the Castle that had been the residence of the Coronals of Majipoor these seven thousand years past, the ever-growing Castle of twenty thousand rooms, or perhaps it was thirty thousand, for who could number them? The Castle that was a great city unto itself, where each Coronal in turn added new rooms of his own to what was already so intricate a building that even residents of many years’ standing easily found themselves lost in its seemingly infinite byways. As she herself had become lost, this very day, while she wandered the Castle’s unfathomable vastnesses in her dream.
By and by she began to speak again, describing for the Su-Suheris how she had made her way, with the aid of this passerby and that one, through that enormous maze of stony galleries and musty tunnels and corridors and staircases and long echoing courtyards toward the more familiar inner bastions. Again and again the perplexing paths doubled back on themselves and she discovered herself entering someplace she had left only a little while before. But always there was someone to help her on her way, and always one of nonhuman origin. It seemed that persons of every race but her own were there to offer guidance to her: first a pair of scaly forked-tongued Ghayrogs, and then a bright-eyed little Vroon who danced ahead of her on its multitude of ever-recoiling tentacles, and some Liimen, and a Su-Suheris or two, and Hjorts, and a massive Skandar, and someone of a species she could not identify at all. “And even, I think, a Metamorph: for it was very thin, and had that greenish skin of theirs, and hardly any lips or nose at all. But what would a Metamorph be doing inside the Castle?”
The two manicurists were finished with her now. They rose and left the room. Briefly the princess inspected her gleaming fingernails and found them acceptable; then, indicating to Melithyrrh that she had bathed long enough, she clambered to her feet and stepped from the tub, smiling faintly at the frantic haste with which Melithyrrh rushed to wrap a towel about her. But the towel was gossamer stuff that scarcely hid the contours of her breasts
and thighs, nor did the Su-Suheris display so much as a flicker of excitement at the sight of the Lady Thismet’s body so skimpily wrapped.
Casually, Thismet blotted herself dry and tossed the towel aside. Immediately Melithyrrh came forward to clothe her in a light robe of ivory-colored cambric oversewn with pink strands of tiny, fragile ganibin-shells.
“Imagine me now passing under the Dizimaule Arch and into the Inner Castle,” she said to Sanibak-Thastimoon. “And suddenly I was all alone, no one in sight, not any Hjorts nor Ghayrogs nor human people, no one. No one. The Inner Castle was utterly deserted. There was a frightening silence, a ghastly silence. A cold wind was blowing across the plaza and strange stars were in the sky, of a kind that I had never seen before, huge bearded stars, stars that trailed bright streams of red flame.
“I was within the heart of the Inner Castle, now, coming up the Ninety-Nine Steps and entering into the centralmost precincts. What I found there was not disposed exactly as the real Inner Castle is, you understand: Lord Siminave’s reflecting pool was on the wrong side of the Pinitor Court, and I couldn’t see the Vildivar Balconies at all, and somehow Lord Arioc’s Watchtower was even more bizarre-looking than it is in fact, with eight or nine tall peaks instead of five, and long looping arms sticking out from every side of it. But I was in the Inner Castle, all right, however much my dreaming mind had changed things around. I could see Stiamot Keep rising up over everything, and Lord Prankipin’s big black treasury building in all its spectacular ugliness, and there was my father’s garden-house, where all the peculiar plants grow; and then the great door to the royal chambers was before me. All this while, as I walked on and on, I saw no one else. It was as if I was the only person in the entire Castle.”
Sanibak-Thastimoon stood statue-still before her, saying nothing, focusing the full concentration of both his heads upon her words.
Steadily, though with an increasing huskiness of voice, the Lady Thismet continued to tell him her tale, describing how in that awesome dreadful solitude she had advanced from room to room within the most sacrosanct precincts of the Castle until at last she stood at the threshold of the throne room itself.
That was a room she knew very well, for it had been built by the command of her father Lord Confalume at the midpoint of his long, distinguished reign, and all through her girlhood she had watched it under construction, month by month, year by year. The old throne room, which was said to go back to the very foundation of the Castle in Lord Stiamot’s time, had long since been deemed too small and plain for its function; and Lord Confalume had resolved, once the greatness of his achievements was apparent to all, to replace it with a site of true magnificence in which the grandest and most solemn ceremonies of the realm might be held, and for which his name would be remembered through all of time to come. And so he had, amalgamating half a dozen inner rooms of no particular significance into the breathtaking high-vaulted throne room that was to be his distinctive contribution to the fabric of the Castle.
The floor of it was fashioned not of the usual slabs of polished stone but rather from the remarkable yellow wood of the gurna, a rare tree of the Khyntor peaks of northern Zimroel that had the radiant glow of a slow-burning fire and the sheen and grace of fine amber. The beams of the room, gigantic square-timbered ones that jutted out with tremendous force from its ceiling, were gilded with delicately hammered sheets of the fine pink gold that came from the mines of eastern Alhanroel, and inset with huge clustering masses of amethysts, sapphires, moonstones, and tourmalines. And on the walls were hung vivid tapestries woven by the most skillful craftsmen of Makroposopos, in which were depicted scenes of the history of Majipoor: its earliest settlement by the voyagers who came across the sea of stars from Old Earth, and then panels that showed the time of the building of the cities and the final conquest of the native Shapeshifters by Lord Stiamot, and finally a group of scenes illustrative of the wondrous expansion of the kingdom under its most recent rulers, who had brought it to its present state of overflowing abundance.
But the heart of the throne room, the core of the Castle itself, was the grand and lordly Confalume Throne. Atop a grand mahogany pedestal cut with many steps it rested, a high curving seat carved from a single mighty block of black opal in which fiery natural veins of blood-scarlet ruby stood forth in an astonishing tracery. Its sides were flanked by massive silver pillars that supported an overarching canopy of gold lined with blue mother-of-pearl, and looming above all else was the starburst that was the symbol of the Coronal’s power, blazing in a splendor of shining white platinum that was tipped at every extremity by spheres of milky-streaked purple onyx.
“The strangest thing of my dream,” said the Lady Thismet to the utterly still Sanibak-Thastimoon, “was that there wasn’t just the one throne in the throne room, but two, both of them of identical aspect, facing each other across the entire expanse of the room. One throne was empty; and the other was occupied by a man who wore the robes and starburst crown of a Coronal. His face was in shadows, but even from some distance away I could tell that he was neither my father nor Prestimion; for plainly he was a much bigger man than either one of them, a man of great size and strength indeed.
“He beckoned me forward; and I came to the center of the room and halted there, unsure of what I should do, a little frightened, even, and when I began to make the starburst sign before him, he raised one hand as though to make me stop. And said to me, in a deep voice that I knew very well, ‘Why do you not take your proper seat, Lady Thismet?’ By which he plainly meant the throne at the opposite side of the room. I went to it and climbed the stairs and placed myself upon that opal seat; and in that moment a brilliant light burst down on the room from the highest point of the roof, and I was able then to see that the man wearing the Coronal’s crown, the man who was seated on the throne facing mine, was my brother Korsibar.”
Once again the Lady Thismet fell silent.
There it was, out in the open at last. Had she been too obvious, too blatant? The silence lingered on and on, and she waited for Sanibak-Thastimoon to offer her his interpretation of her dream; but no interpretation was forthcoming.
Her eyes were bright with yearning. Come, she thought: comprehend my hidden message, you who comprehend everything. Seize the hint I’ve provided, give me the encouragement to go forward to what I most desire, tell me the thing I want so passionately to hear from you!
But the Su-Suheris remained silent.
“That was the dream, Sanibak-Thastimoon. It ended there. I awoke in the moment of that great light, and my soul was deeply troubled by what I had seen.”
“Yes, lady. I understand that.”
She waited hopefully once more; and again the Su-Suheris did not speak.
“You have nothing to tell me?” she asked. “Speak me my dream, Sanibak-Thastimoon! Let me know its meaning!”
“You know its meaning already, my lady.” And he smiled the Su-Suheris version of a smile with both his faces.
So he perceived, then, the pattern of the tapestry she was weaving! But still, she knew, she had to goad him on to the final revelation. It had to come from him first, that statement of the thing that seethed within her.
Well, she could coax, she could beguile, she could hint. In feigned innocence and puzzlement she said, “Ah, but the most obvious meaning is one that defies all law and logic. Dreams often show visions of what is to come, is that not so? Especially dreams as vivid as this. But this dream goes too far. It seems to say that Korsibar is destined to be Coronal, and not Prestimion. Which is a monstrous impossibility. Everyone knows that such a thing may not be.”
“Some dreams are born from our deepest hopes, lady. They show the future we yearn to see, not necessarily the one that is to be. I think this one may have been of that kind.”
“And this deep hope, what is that?”
“You wandered long in the Castle, down many a strange path; and ultimately you came to a familiar place, and there you saw your brother crowned and seated on
your father’s throne. Can it be that you feel within yourself that Prince Korsibar should become Coronal?” the Su-Suheris asked, giving her a sharp close look out of the left pair of eyes.
Thismet felt joy rising within her. But she held to her game. “What are you saying? Do you dare put such wildly seditious words in my mouth?”
“I put nothing in your mouth, my lady, except that which I see is already in your soul. Can it be, lady, that in the secrecy of your heart you regret that the choice will not fall upon your brother?” His inflection was flat and even; both of his two faces were entirely without expression. But a terrible pressure was coming from him all the same. “Tell me, lady: is that not the case?”
Yes. Yes.
It was out at last.
Like everyone else, Thismet had taken it for granted that Prestimion would be Coronal; for how could it be otherwise, with the throne forbidden to Korsibar by ancient custom? And yet, and yet, gradually she had come to question the necessity of Prestimion’s ascent. Why Prestimion? Why should her mighty brother of the shining brow not be king in succession to their father? Surely he merited the crown, all issues of tradition aside.
These were dangerous thoughts. Thismet had kept them hidden in the sealed fastnesses of her spirit. But as Prankipin’s days dwindled, and the imminence of Prestimion’s crowning rose on the horizon like Castle Mount itself, she found herself no longer able to suppress the fierce intensity of her feelings. Korsibar should be Coronal, yes! Korsibar, and no other prince. Korsibar! Korsibar!
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