“I could see his skill at once, from the way he moved even before the contest started. He would be three steps ahead of the other boy at every moment, that I knew.” And, leaning again to Svor, Prestimion said, “Forget this miserable dream of yours, and watch the batons, Svor! Who’ll give me ten crowns on the poison-taster’s next match?”
“One moment more, if you would, Prestimion—” Svor said in that same low conspiratorial tone.
Prestimion was beginning to find Svor’s nagging persistence exasperating. “If I would what?”
“Matters are more precarious than you understand, I think. Attend me: your future and mine are darkened by the shadow of this dream. Go to the Coronal, I beg you. You must force his hand, or we’re surely all lost. Tell him that you fear treachery; ask him to declare you to be Coronal-designate before another day goes by. And if he refuses, stay by his side until he yields to you. Give him no peace so long as he continues to delay. If need be, tell him that you’ll openly proclaim yourself his heir without waiting for him if he won’t do it.”
“This is unthinkable, Svor. I’ll do no such thing.”
“You must, Prestimion.” Svor’s voice was shredded to a hoarse whisper.
“I find your advice unacceptable and unworthy. Force the Coronal’s hand? Harass him on my own behalf? Threaten to declare myself the heir, which would be an infamous thing, against all law and precedent? Why? Simply because you ate too many eels last night and had a bad dream? What are you saying, man?”
“And if Korsibar were to seize his father’s crown in the moment of Prankipin’s death, what then?”
“What’s this? Seize the crown?” Prestimion’s eyes were wide with amazement. “That’s a thing he’d never do! —You make him out most perfidious, Svor. There’s nothing of that in him at all. Besides, his father’s crown doesn’t interest him. Never has. Never will.”
“I know Prince Korsibar very well,” Svor said. “I was of his company for years, have you forgotten? Perfidious he is not, I agree; but he flutters easily in any breeze. Flattery quickly sways his mind. There are those with grand ambitions of their own who think he should be Coronal, and perhaps already have been at work telling him so. And if he has such things poured in his ear often enough—”
“No!” Prestimion cried. “That will never happen!” Angrily, he swept the air before his face with both his outspread hands. “First that Vroon brought me these omens, and now you. No. I’ll not be driven by omens, like some credulous peasant. Let me be, Svor. I love you with all the warmth of my soul, but I tell you that you bother me very greatly just now.”
“There was virtue in that dream, prince, I promise you that.”
“And if you refuse to put this insufferable dream of yours away this instant,” said Prestimion, fuming now, as his wrath began to spill over in him, “I’ll take you by that beard of yours and swing you through the air and pitch you clear over the side of this box. I promise you that most sincerely, Svor. An end on it now. Do you hear me? An end on it!” He glared furiously at Svor, then turned his back on him and looked toward the field.
But Svor’s words still rattled in his head. That was, he thought, no fitting advice for the little duke to have given him: inciting him to treasonous insurrection on no evidence other than the urgings of a dream. It was a coward’s advice—a traitor’s advice, ignoble and bizarre. And foolish besides; for no one forced a Coronal’s hand, and the formidable Confalume would surely destroy him if he were to attempt it. No, it was a sorry thing, for Svor to have advocated such rashness—such wild impudence—merely on account of a dream—
Prestimion struggled to cleanse his mind of it.
8
THE HURDLE RACING and the hoop-jumping and the hammer-throw and other such minor sports were the features of the second day, and the third, and the fourth, of the Pontifical Games. Each day, the visiting lords and some thousands of the citizens of the Labyrinth assembled in the Arena for that day’s diversions. And each day, too, the bulletins from the imperial bedchamber were the same, his majesty the Pontifex’s condition remaining unchanged. It was as though his majesty’s condition, like the weather in the Labyrinth, was inherently incapable of change, and would vary not in the slightest from here to the end of time.
The fifth and sixth and seventh days were set aside for the wrestling bouts. Two dozen contestants had enrolled. But all attention focused on the final match, the great struggle between the famed wrestlers Gialaurys and Farholt. The stands were full for that contest, and complete silence reigned in the Arena as the two hulking men entered the wrestling ring.
Each had brought a magus with him. Farholt’s man was a dark puffy-faced Hjort, one of the many sorcerers of Lord Confalume’s retinue, and Gialaurys had chosen one of the brass-helmeted geomancers from Tidias. These two took up positions before the ring with their backs to each other and set about an elaborate and greatly prolonged procedure of casting of spells, with much chanting and drawing of invisible lines on the ground and invocations of unseen forces overhead.
Septach Melayn pointed toward Gialaurys, who knelt with eyes closed and head bowed, making mystic gestures as his geomancer spun his long skein of rituals. With some annoyance in his tone he said, “Our friend truly takes these matters to heart, eh?”
“Rather more so than his opponent, it seems,” answered Prestimion: for in fact Farholt appeared to be waiting as impatiently as Prestimion himself for the magical rigmarole to end. At last the mages withdrew and Farholt and Gialaurys slipped off their robes, revealing their powerful bodies clad in nothing more than loincloths. Each had oiled his skin with sea-dragon oil to keep his opponent from getting a secure purchase on him; and under the brilliant lights of the Arena the contours and ridges of their arms and backs stood out in startling relief, drawing gasps and exclamations of wonder from the onlookers.
“You will wrestle three falls,” announced the referee, a Pontifical official named Hayla Tekmanot, no small man himself but diminished into insigificance by the great bulk of the contestants. He slapped each man once on the shoulder with the flat of his hand. “This is the signal that you have won and are to release your hold. And this—” He slapped again, twice in succession, “—is the signal that your opponent is unable to continue because of injury, and you are to step back from him at once. Understood?”
Farholt went to the north side of the ring, Gialaurys to the other. The shrill brassy din of gabek-horns sounded in the Arena. Each man performed his obeisance to the Coronal in the center box and bowed to the boxes on either side of Lord Confalume where the other high lords were seated, and, lastly, to the Master of the Games, Prince Gonivaul, high up in his solitary station.
“Let the match begin,” declared Hayla Tekmanot, and they came rushing at each other as if they intended not to wrestle but to kill.
Their giant forms collided in the center of the ring with an impact that could be heard from one end of the Arena to the other. Both men appeared staggered by that bone-cracking crash of flesh against flesh; but they quickly recovered and took up positions nose-to-nose, legs firmly planted, each locking his arms about the other’s shoulders, each struggling in vain to send the other down to a quick fall. There they stood, stiff, immobile, for many a moment. Farholt could be seen to whisper something in a harsh, rough voice to Gialaurys, who stared at him as though astonished at his words; and then a fierce look of anger came over Gialaurys’s features and he replied, something just as coldly and harshly spoken but likewise too low in tone to be heard by any of the onlookers.
The long stasis held. Neither could get the advantage. They were too evenly matched.
Farholt was the taller by a head and his arms were longer, but Gialaurys was somewhat heavier of body and even broader than Farholt across the shoulders, deeper through the chest. Minutes passed; but, try as they could, neither was able to make his rival give ground. Mighty grunts came from them. The muscles of their arms and backs stood out in terrible bulges as though they would leap ou
t through the skin. Sweat ran in torrents down their oiled bodies. Gialaurys seemed to find leverage over Farholt, but Farholt resisted and held his footing, and then it was Gialaurys who swayed ever so slightly against the pressure Farholt exerted.
The deadlock went on and on. A steady rising clamor came from the crowd. Nearly everyone in the royal boxes was standing now, calling out the name of one or the other. Prestimion looked across to the Coronal’s box and saw Prince Korsibar on his feet, wide-eyed, transfixed, shouting, “Farholt! Farholt!” with frenzied zeal, and then he realized that he was shouting too, perhaps just as frenziedly, crying the name of Gialaurys.
“Look you there,” Septach Melayn said. “I think Farholt budges him.”
It was so. Farholt’s eyes were wild and veins were standing out like thick ropes on his ruddy-hued forehead, but he had indeed managed to pry one of Gialaurys’s feet upward from the ground and was straining to lift the other one free. Prestimion saw sudden pallor on Gialaurys’s face. He had become as white as Farholt was florid, so that his bristly sideburns stood out as heavy brown bars against his newly bloodless cheeks.
For an instant it seemed that Farholt would succeed in lifting Gialaurys entirely, like a tree pulled up by its roots, and hurl him to the floor of the ring.
But just as Gialaurys’s left foot was a moment away from rising, he quickly brought around the one that was already raised from the ground and kicked Farholt with it in the hollow of his leg so savagely that Farholt’s balance was broken and he was forced to bend that leg forward at the knee. Now it was Farholt who was in danger of toppling. Desperately seeking some sort of grip, he wedged his right hand inside Gialaurys’s gaping mouth and tugged at Gialaurys’s lower jaw as though he had it in mind to rip it from Gialaurys’s face. A dark rivulet of blood ran down Farholt’s arm; but whether it was the blood of Gialaurys or Farholt’s own, none of the watchers could say.
Svor said, almost to himself, “This should be halted. It is not sport but a disgrace: they will murder each other.” Gialaurys maintained his hold. Grasping Farholt by both shoulders and twisting, he gave him a shove that was meant to send him over on his back.
Farholt spun sideways as he fell. Seizing Gialaurys around the neck with his free left hand, he pulled him down with him. Each locked in the other’s grip, they toppled together, falling headlong and landing side by side, both of them hitting the ground with horrendous force.
“Pin him, Gialaurys!” Prestimion cried. And from the adjoining box came a bellowing from Korsibar: “Farholt! Now! Now! Get him, Farholt!” Farholt’s brother Farquanor, who was seated in the royal box today, just behind Prince Korsibar, was on his feet and calling out encouragement to Farholt too, and his narrow face was agleam with a glow of imminent victory.
But, as before, neither wrestler was able to seize advantage over the other. Both men were stunned by the heavy landing they had made; they lay like two felled logs for a long while, then began to stir and slowly came to sitting positions, staring befuddledly at each other. Gialaurys rubbed his jaw and the side of his head; Farholt kneaded his knee and thigh. They were watchful, each poised as if to leap up if the other one did, but neither seemed capable of arising just yet. Hayla Tekmanot knelt between them, briefly conferring with them both. Then the referee rose, walked to the edge of the ring and looked up at Prince Gonivaul.
“I declare the first fall to be a draw,” he called. “The contestants will rest for five minutes before proceeding.”
“A word with you, prince?” said the Procurator Dantirya Sambail during the interlude between the bouts, inclining his upper body halfway across the low barrier between his box and the one in which Prince Korsibar sat.
Korsibar, his mind still whirling from the heat and intensity of that desperate struggle just concluded, peered up into the Procurator’s massive bellicose face and waited for the other to speak.
In an overly amiable tone of man-to-man camaraderie, Dantirya Sambail said, “I have a hundred royals riding on your man. Will he prevail, do you think?”
That unwarranted note of easy intimacy caused some anger in Korsibar. He replied steadily, though, “I have fifty on him myself. But I have no more idea than you do who will prevail.”
The Procurator pointed toward the box on the far side, where Prestimion was deep in conversation with Septach Melayn and Prince Serithorn. In the same manner of unearned congeniality as before he said, “Prestimion, so I’ve been told, has five hundred royals on Gialaurys.”
“A princely sum, if that’s true. But are you sure? Prestimion’s not much of a gambler. Fifty crowns would be more his kind of wager.”
“Not crowns but royals, and not fifty but five hundred,” said Dantirya Sambail. “I am not mistaken in this.” He held a cold roast leg of bilantoon in his hand; he paused now to bite off a chunk of the delicate white meat and to spit out some bits of skin and gristle. After wiping his lips with the sleeve of his jewel-bedecked robe, he said casually, giving Korsibar a slow, icy, malicious stare, “It’s not really gambling if you know the outcome in advance, is it?”
“Are you saying that Farholt’s been bribed to lose? By the Lady, Dantirya Sambail, you don’t know Farholt at all if you think that he—”
“Not bribed. Drugged, so I hear. A potion designed to work in a gradual way, and to weaken him as the bout proceeds. Of course, it’s only a rumor. My cup-bearer Mandralisca heard it, during the batons.” The Procurator smiled silkily. “You’re right, Korsibar: there’s probably no truth to it. And even if there is, well, what’s the loss of fifty or a hundred royals to men like ourselves?” He winked and said, once more using the quiet, insinuating voice he had employed at the outset, “In any case, how much like Prestimion it would be to have arranged the outcome in favor of his friend. He looks after his friends, that one, by any means available.”
Korsibar made a gesture of indifference, as though to say that these theories were no affair of his and that he disliked such slanderous talk as the Procurator was offering.
He had never cared for the company of Dantirya Sambail. There were few who did. The Procurator had a certain ferocious air of majesty about him, yes, but to Korsibar he merely seemed base, swinish, a venomous monster of self-regard. Yet of course Dantirya Sambail ruled an immense hereditary domain on the other continent with absolute force, and had to be accepted into the ranks of the great princes on that account: he was the Coronal’s subject, at least in name, but he controlled vast wealth and huge resources, and one did not lightly reject his company. Nevertheless Korsibar wished that the Procurator would return to his seat.
“Well,” said Dantirya Sambail cheerfully, “we’ll see soon enough whether the tale is true. And look, now our gladiators seem to be getting ready to try a second fall.”
Korsibar only nodded.
“I’d pay more attention to Prestimion’s antics, if I were you,” Dantirya Sambail said, making no move to withdraw. “I hear many strange tales about him, and not just concerning the drugging of wrestlers.” His heavy eyelids fluttered with a curious daintiness. “For example, has anyone told you yet that he plans to have you removed once he’s become Coronal?”
The calm words fell upon Korsibar like javelins.
“What?”
“Oh, yes. The story’s been going around. As soon as he’s got the crown on his head, a convenient accident is arranged for you, something during a hunt perhaps. He can’t afford to let you live, you know.”
Korsibar felt deep shock that verged on disgust. “These are very offensive lunacies that you’re spouting, Dantirya Sambail.”
Color came to the Procurator’s fleshy face. His lips grew thin; he drew his head downward so that his neck swelled and thickened; and those oddly tender and thoughtful violet-gray eyes of his turned suddenly hard. But his smile remained unwavering. “Ah, no need to be angered at me, dear prince! I’m only repeating what I hear, because perhaps it may be of use to you. And what I hear is that you’re a dead man once Majipoor’s in his hand.?
??
“This is absurd,” Korsibar said curtly.
“Look: if you live, and Prestimion’s reign does not go so well, you’ll always be a threat to him. Does he want all the world muttering about Lord Confalume’s glorious son, who might have been Coronal himself, but was passed over? Oh, no, no, no. If times grow hard, and that may very well happen sooner or later, someone will surely cry, ‘Put Prestimion aside, make Korsibar Coronal,’ and soon they all will be screaming it. You said yourself that Prestimion’s no gambler. Your continued existence carries risks for him, for you are perilous to him. He’s no man to tolerate risks, or threats, or rivals, or any sort of obstacles. And so—the unfortunate hunting accident, the balcony railing that suddenly isn’t there, the collision on the highway, some such thing. Believe me: I know him. He and I are of the same blood.”
“I know him too, Dantirya Sambail.”
“Perhaps. But I tell you this: if I were Prestimion, I would have you removed from the world.”
“If Prestimion were you, very likely he would,” said Korsibar. “I praise the Divine that he isn’t.” The sound of the gabek-horns could be heard across the field, none too soon for Korsibar. He had heard far too much already; he was sickened and revolted by these ugly hypotheses of the Procurator’s, and his fingers were trembling with rage, as if they longed by independent will to wrap themselves around Dantirya Sambail’s meaty neck. “It’s time for the second fall,” Korsibar said, swinging brusquely away from the other man. “Speak no more to me of these things, Dantirya Sambail.”
Farholt came out from his corner this time plainly bent on Gialaurys’s immediate destruction. He sprang at once at the heavier man, pushing him back toward the far corner of the ring with sudden unstoppable fury. Gialaurys, who appeared to be puzzled at the wild rage of Farholt’s onslaught, planted one foot fore and one aft in a resolute attempt at bracing himself. Farholt backed away a little at that and swung his left elbow around, ramming it savagely into the middle of Gialaurys’s face. That brought a howl of pain from him and sent a bright stream of blood running down his face. Gialaurys pressed both his hands to the bridge of his nose.