“Look,” Septach Melayn said, scooping up one silver piece and tapping it with his fingernail. “Do you see this lettering of antique style at the edge? This is Lord Arioc here, whose Pontifex was Dizimaule.”
“But they lived three thousand years ago!” Prestimion exclaimed.
“Somewhat more than that, I think. And who is this? Lord Vildivar, I believe it says. With Thraym’s face on the other side.”
“And here,” said Gialaurys, reaching past Prestimion to pull a coin out of the box, and puzzling over the inscription on it. “This is Lord Siminave. Do you know of a Siminave?”
“He was Calintane’s Coronal, I think,” said Prestimion. He looked sternly at the old man. “There’s a fortune in this box! Five hundred royals, at the least! Why would you sell this money to us for a quick price? You could simply spend the coins one by one and live like a prince for the rest of your life!”
“Ah, my lord, who would believe that a man like me could have amassed a treasure like this? They’d call me a thief, and lock me away forever. And this is very ancient money, too. Even I can see that, though I can’t read; for these are strange faces, these Coronals and Pontifexes here. People would be suspicious of money this old. They’d refuse it, not knowing the faces of these kings. No. No. I found the box by a canal, where the rain had washed away the soil. Someone buried it long ago for safe keeping, I suppose, and never returned for it. But it does me no good, my lords, to have such money as this.” The old man grinned slyly, showing a few snaggled teeth. “Give me—ah, let us say two hundred crowns, in money I can spend—give it me in ten-crown pieces, or even smaller coins—and the box is yours to deal with as you wish. For I see that you three are men of consequence, my lords, and will know how to dispose of money of this sort.”
“Is a babbling old moon-calf,” said Gialaurys, tossing his coin back in the box and tapping his forefinger to his forehead. “No one would refuse good silver royals, however old they be.” And Septach Melayn nodded and smiled and twirled his forefinger in a little circle.
With which opinion Prestimion found himself in agreement. He felt pity for the dirty, bedraggled old man. That burning brightness in his gaze was insanity, not intelligence.
Surely this was one more dismaying instance of the strange madness that seemed to be polluting the world. He might indeed be a thief, yes, who had taken these coins from some collector of antiquities. Or, what was more likely from the looks of the box that held them, he really had found them beside the canal. But either way it was a madman’s act to be offering them so cheaply, the merest fraction of their true value, to strangers met by happenstance.
Nor did Prestimion want any entanglement in these dealings. How could he, of all people in the world, be party to a transaction by which he bought hundreds of royals’ worth of silver from a beggar for a double handful of crowns? He felt a touch of horror at standing this close to madness. Longing profoundly to be gone from this place, he told Septach Melayn to give the man fifty crowns and let him keep the treasure for some other buyer.
The beggar looked astonished as Septach Melayn counted out five ten-crown pieces and passed them across. But he took the money and tucked it in a belt beneath his robe. Then his crafty eyes widened and an expression that might have been fear flashed across his face. “Ah, but one must ever give value for money.” He snatched three coins from his own horde. Seizing Prestimion once more by the wrist, the old man pressed them into the palm of his hand, and went scurrying rapidly away, clutching his box of coins to his bony bosom.
“What a strange business,” Prestimion said. The sour aroma of the old lunatic’s tattered garments lingered after him. He poked gingerly at the ancient coins with his fingertip, turning them from side to side. “They’re odd-looking old things, aren’t they? Kanaba and Lord Sirruth, I think we have here, and Guadeloom and Lord Calintane, and this one—no, I can’t make these names out at all. Well, no matter. Here, take care of these for me,” he said, giving them to Septach Melayn. They moved along.—"Two hundred crowns for the whole box?” Prestimion said, after a time. “He could have asked twenty times as much. A fool, do you think, or a thief, or a madman?”
“Why not all three?” said Septach Melayn.
Putting the episode from their minds, they spent two days more in languid Hoikmar, drifting about the taverns and markets of that serene lakeside city. Two other troublesome incidents disturbed the tranquility of the visit. A lanky raddled-looking woman with utterly vacant eyes drifted up to Septach Melayn in the main avenue and draped a costly stole of scarlet gebrax hide around his shoulders, murmuring that the Pontifex had instructed her to give it to him. Upon saying which, she turned instantly and lost herself in the busy traffic of the street. And a little later that day, while they were buying a meal of grilled sausages from a Liiman in the city plaza, a well-dressed man of middle years quietly waiting on line behind them, a man who might have been a university professor or the proprietor of a prosperous jewelry boutique, suddenly cried out in a wild voice that the Liiman was selling poisoned meat. Shouldering his way forward, he up-ended the cart onto the pavement, sending hot coals and skewers of half-cooked sausages spraying everywhere about, and went marching furiously away growling to himself.
These were disquieting things. Prestimion’s purpose of going out with his companions in disguise had been to see at first hand the other side of Majipoor life, something other than that of the Castle and its gilded lords. But he had not anticipated so much darkness and strangeness, such a welter of irrational behavior.
Had it always been this way out in the cities? he wondered—open displays of madness, public manifestations of the bizarre? Or, as Septach Melayn had sometime ago suggested, was all this some sort of aftereffect of the obliteration of the memory of the war upon the minds of the most sensitive and vulnerable citizens? Either way the thought was distasteful. But Prestimion felt particular alarm at the possibility that he himself, by his desire to cleanse in an instant way the wound that the Korsibar insurrection had inflicted on the world, was responsible for this entire epidemic of madness, this strange plague of mental derangement, that appeared to be increasing in virulence from one week to the next.
In Minimool, Hoikmar’s neighbor in the Guardian Cities, further signs of such things made themselves manifest. Prestimion found two days there more than sufficient for him.
He had heard that Minimool was a place of distinctive and arresting appearance, but in his present mood he found it oppressively strange: a huddled-together city made up of clumps of tall narrow buildings with white walls and black roofs and tiny windows, crowded one up against another like so many bundles of spears. Steep vertiginous streets that were little more than alleyways separated one clump from the next. And here, too, he heard weird shrill laughter out of open windows high overhead, and saw more than a few people walking in the streets with fixed expressions and glassy eyes, and collided in a doorway with someone in a frantic hurry who burst into gulping breathless sobs as she went sprinting frenetically away.
His sleep was punctuated by troubled dreams as well. In one the beggar with the coin-box from Hoikmar came to him, grinning his evil snaggle-toothed grin, and opened the box and showered him with coins, hundreds of them, thousands, until he was half buried beneath their weight. Prestimion woke, trembling and sweating; but later he slept again, and another dream came, and this time he stood at the edge of a lovely pearly-hued lake at sunrise with This-met, quietly admiring a sky suffused with pink and emerald streaks, and Simbilon Khayf’s dark-haired daughter came up to them out of nowhere and swiftly thrust the silent unresisting Thismet into the water, where she vanished without a trace. This time Prestimion cried out harshly as he awakened, and Septach Melayn, lying on a nearby cot in the hostelry where they were spending the night, reached across and gripped him by the forearm until he was calm.