Prestimion meant to stop in one city of each of the five rings of the Mount. The various host city mayors had, of course, been notified weeks before, and were ready to meet the high and crushingly costly responsibility of providing lodgings and proper festivities for a Coronal and his entourage.
Muldemar was the chosen stop among the High Cities: Prestimion’s own native place, where he could sleep once more at his family’s great estate of Muldemar House, and hunt sigimoins and bilantoons in his own game preserve, and embrace the loyal retainers who had served his parents and his grandparents before them, and accept the homage of the good people of Muldemar City, to whom he was not only their Coronal but their prince and their friend. Here he quietly asked the stewards and chamberlains whether there had been any problems among the workers of late; and was told, yes, yes, a few strange things had occurred, people complaining of a kind of forgetfulness of trivial and non-trivial things, and even some serious instances of deep confusion and inner distress verging on—well, on madness. But it was only a passing thing, Prestimion was told, and no reason for great concern.
Then it was on to Peritole of the Inner Cities, where seven million people lived in splendid isolation amid some of the most spectacular scenery of the upper Mount: subordinate mountain ranges of wild beauty, and strange purple conical peaks rising to great heights out of gray-green graveled plains, and above all the magnificent natural stone staircase of Peritole Pass, that gave access from above to the long sloping sprawl of the tremendous mountain’s midsection. In Peritole, too, Prestimion heard tales of breakdown and mental confusion, though those who told these stories to him brushed them quickly aside as insignificant, and urged the Coronal to sample another tray of the pungent smoked meats that were the specialty of the city.
Downward. Strave of the Guardian Cities, a place of the grandest architectural exuberance, no two structures remotely alike, great palaces chock-a-block defying one another in their glorious excess, profusions of towers and pavilions and belvederes and steeples and belfries and cupolas and rotundas and porticos sprouting madly everywhere like giant mushrooms. The city had only recently emerged from a period of official mourning, for Earl Alexid of Strave had died not long before—of a sudden seizure, it was said. The new earl, Alexid’s son Verligar, was hardly more than a boy, and plainly overawed by the presence of the Coronal at his side. But he pledged his loyalty most graciously. That was a taxing moment for Prestimion, who was privately aware that his one-time friend and hunting companion Earl Alexid had died not of any inward failing of his flesh but in fact under the sword of Septach Melayn, in the battle of Arkilon plain, during the early days of the Korsibar insurrection.
There had been some outbreaks of mental disturbances in Strave as well, it seemed, though neither Earl Verligar nor anyone else was greatly eager to speak of them. The subject seemed an embarrassment to them, as it had been in Muldemar.
When the feasting was done in Strave the Coronal and his companions moved on to their next destination. That was white-walled Minimool, of the Guardian Cities; and from there, after a few days, a journey of seventy miles down the long sloping flank of the lower Mount brought Prestimion to Gimkandale of the Free Cities, and then another hundred miles of zigzagging highways at the mountain’s widespreading base took him to the final city of his tour, ancient Normork, second oldest of the Slope Cities.
“This is a dark heavy place,” Gialaurys murmured to Prestimion, as their floater passed through the curiously inconspicuous gate that was the single opening in Normork’s gigantic wall of black stone. “I feel its weight on me already, and we’re scarcely inside the town!”
Prestimion, who was leaning from his floater’s window, waving and smiling to the crowd that lined the road, felt it also. Normork clung to the dark fangs of the range known as Normork Crest the way some hunted animal clings to a precarious perch that it knows to be beyond its enemies’ reach. The great black wall that protected the city—against whom? Prestimion wondered—was entirely out of proportion to the towers of gray stone behind it, a fantastically overbearing fortification impossible to justify by any rational means. And that lone tiny gate—what a strange statement that made! Was this not Majipoor, where all peoples lived in peace and harmony? Why hide yourselves like frightened mice in such a miserable inward-turning fashion as this?
But he was Coronal of all Majipoor, the strange cities as well as the beautiful ones, and it was not for him to disapprove of the way any place cared to display itself to the world. And so he favored the Normork folk with dazzling smiles and enthusiastic salutes, and made starbursts to them as they made them to him, and let them see by every aspect of his demeanor how pleased he was to be entering their splendid city. And to Gialaurys he said, hissing under his breath, “Smile! Look happy! This place is much beloved by those who dwell here, and we are not here as its judges, Gialaurys.”
“Beloved, is it? I’d sooner embrace a sea-dragon!”
“Pretend you are in Piliplok,” said Prestimion. A sly remark, that was; for Gialaurys’s own native city, somber Piliplok where no street deviated so much as an inch from the rigid plan that had been laid out thousands of years before, was itself widely considered a grim and depressing place by those who did not happen to have been born there. But Prestimion’s light-hearted gibe slipped easily past the Grand Admiral, as such gibes often did, and in his diligent way Gialaurys summoned up the closest thing he could manage to a sunny smile and thrust his head out the window on his side of the floater to show the Normork folk what delight he felt at beholding their pretty town.
It was a bright golden day, at least, and the gray stone blocks out of which the buildings of Normork were constructed took on a pleasantly radiant shimmer. Once one is inside the wall, Prestimion thought, the city has a certain kind of ponderous charm.
There was nothing charming, though, about the fortresslike palace of the Counts of Normork. It was a solid mass of stone, crouching in a curving bay of the wall like a great predatory beast about to spring upon the city it dominated. The plaza in front of it was packed with people, thousands of them, with untold thousands more jammed into the narrow streets beyond. “Prestimion!” they were shouting. “Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” Or so he supposed the words to be; but the outcry blurred into chaotic incoherence as it rebounded from the rough stone walls all around, and became merely a dull booming rhythmic sound.
Count Meglis—a new man; Prestimion did not know him well; he was some distant relative of Iram, the former count who had been slain in the civil war—came out to greet him. This Meglis was a swarthy man, wide and blocky and built low to the ground like the palace of which he was now the possessor, with unpleasant little bloodshot eyes and a great startling space between his front teeth both above and below. There was something about his square-sided frame and solidly anchored stance that reminded Prestimion uncomfortably of Dantirya Sambail. It would have been much more pleasing to be received here today by the good-hearted red-haired Count Iram, that superb chariot-racer and more than able archer.
But Iram had fallen fighting in the service of Korsibar, and so had his lithe young brother Lamiran; and the welcome that this Count Meglis offered seemed genuine and warm enough. He stood firmly planted on the lowest steps of his palace, arms outspread, grinning a great snaggle-toothed grin that conveyed complete and absolute delight at the idea that the Coronal of Majipoor was to be his guest at dinner tonight.