Robert Silverberg - Majipoor - Lord Prestimion

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Part 1, The Book of Becoming.

The coronation ceremony, with its ancient ritual incantations and

investitures and ringing trumpet-calls, and the climactic donning

of the crown and the royal robes, had ended fifty minutes

ago. Now came a space of several hours in the festivities before

the celebratory

coronation feast. 'There was a furious, noisy bustling and hustling

throughout the vastness of the great building that from this day

onward would be known to the world as Lord Prestimion's Castle, as

the thousands of guests and the thousands of servitors made ready

for

that evening's grand banquet. Only the new Coronal himself stood

apart and alone, in a sphere of echoing silence.

After all the strife and turmoil of civil war, the usurpation and

the battles

and the defeats and the heartbreak, the hour of victory had come.

Prestimion was the anointed Coronal of Majipoor at last, and eager

take up his new tasks.

But-to his great surprise-something troublesome, something profoundly

unsettling, had surfaced within him in this glorious hour. The

sense of relief and achievement that he had felt at the knowledge

that

his reign was finally beginning was, he realized, being unexpectedly

tempered by a strange core of uneasiness. Why, though? Uneasiness

over what? This was his moment of triumph, and he should be

rejoicing.

And yet-even so.

A powerful hunger for privacy amid all the frenzy of the day had

come

over him toward the end of the coronation ceremony, and, when it

was

over, he had abruptly gone off to sequester himself in the

immensity of

the Great Hall of Lord Hendighail, where he could be alone. That

huge

room was where the celebratory gifts that had been arriving steadily

all

month, a river of wonderful things flowing toward the Castle without

cease from every province of Majipoor, lay piled in glittering array.

Prestimion had only the haziest notion of when Lord

Hendighail had

lived-seven, eight, nine hundred years before, something

like thatand

none at all of the man's life and deeds. But it

was obvious that

Hendighail had believed in doing things on a colossal

scale. The

Hendighail Hall was one of the biggest rooms in the

entire enormous

Castle, a mighty chamber ten times as long as it was

wide, and lofty in

proportion, with a planked ceiling of red ghakka-timber

supported by

groined vaults of black stone whose intricately

interwoven traceries

were lost in the dimness far overhead.

The Castle, though, was a city in itself, with

busy central districts and

old, half-forgotten peripheral ones, and Lord Hendighail

had caused his

great hall to be built on the northern side of

Castle Mount, which was

the wrong side, the obscure side. Prestimion, although

he had lived at the

Mount most of his life, could not remember ever

having set foot in the

Hendighail Hall before this day. In modern times it

had been used mainly

as a storage depot, where objects that had not yet

found their proper

places were kept. Which was how it was being employed

today: a warehouse

for the tribute coming in from all over the world

for the new

Coronal.

It was packed now with the most astounding

assortment of things, a

fantastic display of the color and wonder of Majipoor.

The custom was,

when a new ruler came to the throne, for all the

myriad cities and towns

and villages of Majipoor to vie with one another in

bestowing gifts of

great splendor upon him. But this time-so said the

old ones, the ones

whose memories went back more than forty years to the

last coronation-they

had outdone themselves in generosity. What had arrived

thus far was three, five, ten times as much as might

have been

expected. Prestimion felt stunned and dazed by the

profusion of it all.

He had hoped that inspecting this great flow of

gifts from all the farflung

districts of the world might lift his spirits in

this unexpectedly

cheerless moment. Coronation gifts, after all, were

meant to tell a new

Coronal that the world welcomed him to the throne.

But to his distress he discovered immediately that

they were having

the opposite effect. There was something disturbing and

unhealthy

about so much excess. What he wanted the world to be

saying to him

was that it was happy to have a bold and vigorous

young Coronal taking

the place of the old and weary Lord Confalume atop

Castle Mount. This

extraordinary torrent of costly presents was altogether too great a

display

of gratitude, though. It was extreme; it was

disproportionate; it

indicated that the world was undergoing a kind of

wild frenzy of delight

over his accession, altogether out of keeping with the

actual fact of the

event.

That worldwide overreaction mystified him. Surely they

had not

been that eager for Lord Confalume to go. They had loved

Lord

Confalume, who had been a great Coronal in his day,

although everyone

knew that Confalume's day now was over and it was time

for someone

new and more dynamic to occupy the seat of kingly

power, and that

Prestimion was the right man. Even'so, this outpouring of

gifts upon the

transfer of authority seemed almost as much an expression

of relief as

one of joy.

Relief over what? Prestimion wondered. What had

triggered such a

superfluity of jubilation, verging on worldwide hysteria?

A fierce civil war had lately come to a happy

outcome. Were they

rejoicing over that, perhaps?

No. No.

The citizens of Majipoor could not possibly know

anything about the

sequence of strange events-the conspiracy and the

usurpation and

the terrible war that followed it-that had brought Lord Prestimion by

such a roundabout route to his throne. All of that had

been obliterated

from the world's memory by Prestimion's own command. So

far as

Majipoor's billions of people were aware, the civil war

had never happened

. The brief illegitimate reign of the self-styled Coronal

Lord

Korsibar had vanished from memory as though it had never

been. As

the world understood things, Lord Confalume, upon the

death of the

old Pontifex Prankipin, had succeeded to Prankipin's title,

whereupon

Prestimion had serenely and uneventfully been elevated to

the

Coronal's throne, which Confalume had held for so long.

So, then, why

this furore? Why?

Along all four sides of the huge room the bewildering

overabundance

of gifts rose high, most of them still in their

packing-cases, mountains

of stacked treasure climbing toward the distant

roof-timbers.

Room after room of this rarely used northern wing of the

Castle was

filled with crates from far-off districts whose names

meant little or nothIng

to Prestimion. Some of them were familiar to him only

as notations

on the map, others not known to him at all. New loads

of cargo were

arriving even now. The chamberlains of the Castle were

at their wits'

end to deal with it all.

And what lay before him here was only a fraction of

what had come

in. There were the live gifts, too. 'The people of the

provinces had sent

an extraordinary assortment of animals, a whole zoo's

worth of them

and then some, the most bizarre and fantastic beasts to

be found on

Majipoor. The Divine be thanked, they were being kept

somewhere

else. And strange plants as well, for the Coronal's

garden. Prestimion

had seen some of those yesterday: some huge trees with

foliage like

swords of gleaming silver, and grotesque succulent

things with twisted

spiky leaves, and a couple of sinister carnivorous

mouthplants from

Zimroel, clanking their central jaws to show how

horrendously eager

they were to be fed, and a tub of dark porphyry

filled with translucent

gambeliavos from Stoienzar's northern coast, that

looked as if they

were made of spun glass and gave off soft tinkling

sighs when you

passed your hand over them-and much more besides,

botanical splendors

beyond enumeration. All those too were elsewhere.

The sheer volume of all this, the great size of

the offering, was overwhelming

. His mind could not take it all in.

To Prestimion it seemed as if this great piled-up

mass of objects was

Majipoor itself in all its size and complexity: as

if the entire massive

world, largest planet in the galaxy, had somehow

forced its way into this

one room today. Standing in the midst of his mounds

of gifts, he felt

dwarfed by the lavishness of the display, the

dazzling extravagant prodigality

of it. He knew that he should be pleased; but the

only emotion he

could manage, surrounded by so much tangible evidence

of his new

grandeur, was a kind of numbed dismay. That

unexpected and baffling

sense of hollowness that had been mounting in him

throughout the

lengthy formalities of the rite that had made him

Coronal Lord of

Majipoor, leaving him mysteriously saddened and somber

in what

should have been his hour of triumph, now threatened

to engulf his

entire soul.

As though in a dream Prestimion wandered around the hall, randomly

examining some of the packages that his staff had

already opened.

Here was a shimmering crystal pillow, within which

could be seen a

richly detailed rural landscape, green carpets of

moss, trees with bright

yellow foliage, the purple roof-tiles of some pretty

town unknown to

him, everything as vivid and real as though the

place portrayed were

actually contained within the stone. A scroll attached

to it declared it to

be the gift of the village of Glau, in the province

of Thelk Samminon, in

western Zimroel. With it came a scarlet coverlet of

richly woven silken

brocade, fashioned, so the scroll said, of the fine

fleece of the local

water-worms.

Here was a casket brimming with rare gems of many

colors, which

gave off a pulsating glow in gold and bronze and

purple and crimson

like the finest of sunsets. Here was a glossy cloak

of cobalt-blue feathers-the

feathers of the famous fire-beetles of Gamarkaim,

said the

accompanying note, giant insects that looked like

birds and were invulnerable

to the touch of flame. The wearer of the cloak

would be as well.

And here, fifty sticks of the precious red charcoal of

Hyanng, which

when kindled had the ability to drive any disease from

the body of the

Coronal.

Here, an exquisite set of small figurines lovingly

carved from some

shining translucent green stone. They depicted, so their

label informed

him, the typical wildlife of the district of Karpash: a

dozen or more

images of unfamiliar and extraordinary beasts, portrayed

down to the

tiniest details of fur and horns and claws. They began to

move about,

snorting and scampering and chasing one another around the

box that

held them, as soon as Prestimion's breath had warmed them

to life.

And heref

Prestimion heard the great door of the hall creaking open

behind

him. Someone entering. He would not be allowed to be alone even

here.

A discreet cough; the sound of approaching footsteps. He

peered

into the shadows at the far end of the room.

A slender, lanky figure, drawing near.

"Ah. There you are, Prestimion. Akbalik told me you

were in here.

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摘要：

Part1,TheBookofBecoming.Thecoronationceremony,withitsancientritualincantationsandinvestituresandringingtrumpet-calls,andtheclimacticdonningofthecrownandtheroyalrobes,hadendedfiftyminutesago.Nowcameaspaceofseveralhoursinthefestivitiesbeforethecelebratorycoronationfeast.'Therewasafurious,noisybustling...

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Robert Silverberg - Majipoor - Lord Prestimion

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