To his left, as he took the throne, stood the chamberlain Zeldor Luudwid, with a table beside him on which the decorations to be handed out today were piled. A little farther on was Maundigand-Klimd, who was flanked to right and left, as though they were bookends, by the two Tidias geomancers. On the other side of the throne were a couple of secondary chamberlains—two massive Skandars who were huge even as Skandars went—carrying great staffs of office. Prestimion caught sight of Septach Melayn in the shadows just beyond, studying him thoughtfully. For the High Counsellor to attend a levee was a bit unusual; but Prestimion had a good idea of why Septach Melayn had showed up here today.
For there was Simbilon Khayf out there, plainly visible among the multitude of citizens who would be presented to the Coronal this day—that rigid pile of glittering silver hair was unmistakable—and there was the lady Varaile, tall and stately and beautiful, at her father’s side. And Septach Melayn—damn him!—was here, Prestimion realized, to supervise her meeting with the Coronal.
“His lordship the Coronal Prestimion welcomes you to the Castle,” Zeldor Luudwid intoned grandly, “and bids you know that he has studied your attainments and achievements with care and regards each of you as an ornament of the realm.”
It was the standard greeting. Prestimion, only half listening, nevertheless adopted a pose of seeming attentiveness, sitting staunchly upright and looking serenely outward at the waiting crowd. He took care, though, not to let his eyes fasten on anyone in particular. He aimed his gaze well above their heads, so that it rested on the glowing tapestry on the far wall, the one depicting Lord Stiamot receiving the homage of the conquered Metamorphs.
Idly he wondered, not for the first time, how many thousands of royals Confalume had expended while he was Coronal in the course of creating the fabulous throne-room that bore his name. Prestimion made a mental note to search the archives some day for the exact amount. Probably it was more than Stiamot had spent to build the original Castle in the first place. It had taken years to construct this high-vaulted room, with its gem-encrusted beams covered with hammered sheets of pale-red gold, its spectacular tapestries, its floor of costly yellow gurnawood. The throne alone must surely have cost a fortune—not just for that colossal block of black opal of which it was fashioned, but for the stout silver pillars beside it and the great canopy of gold, inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, that those pillars supported, and for the starburst symbol above all the rest, made of white platinum tipped by spheres of purple onyx.
But of course the money had been there for Confalume to spend. Majipoor had never known such a time of affluence and general well-being as it had in his reign.
Much of that was due to good luck: a general absence, for many decades now, of droughts, floods, great storms, and other natural disasters. But also the former Coronal—building on the work of his predecessor, Lord Prankipin—had promulgated a sharp cut in taxation, with immediate benefits, and had gone to great lengths to seek out and extirpate ancient and foolish trade restrictions that were holding back the free flow of goods from one province to another. He had acted in many other ways to eliminate all manner of unneeded regulatory impediments, also. In this he had had the valuable support of Dantirya Sambail, who as Procurator of Ni-moya had come over the years to rule the lesser continent of Zimroel virtually as a king in his own right. Many of those ancient trade regulations had originally been enacted to protect the interests of Zimroel against the older and more fully developed continent of Alhanroel. But Dantirya Sambail understood that all those obsolete restrictions were by now doing more harm than good and had raised no objection to striking them from the books. As a result there had been an enormous worldwide increase in productivity and in the general welfare of all.
From Prestimion’s point of view that was both good and bad. He had been given the throne of a wondrously thriving realm, and though it was necessary now to cope with the damage that the civil war had done and the fact that Dantirya Sambail had ceased to be an agent for the general good and had become an obstacle to its continuation, Prestimion was confident that both of those problems could be dealt with quickly enough. They had better be. His name would be cursed forever if during the years ahead he failed to sustain the level of prosperity that had been reached in the time of Lord Confalume.
One by one the day’s chosen ornaments of the realm, whose attainments and achievements the Coronal had studied with such care, were summoned to the throne to be acknowledged for all that they had done.
No members of the titled nobility were here today. The aristocracy received its rewards in other ways. The group now gathered before the Coronal was made up of humbler folk: elected officials of cities or provinces, and an assortment of businesspeople, and farmers who had in one noteworthy fashion or another advanced the state of agriculture; and also artists and writers, stage performers, athletes, even a scholar or two.
Usually Prestimion was able to call from his memory the reason why each of them was being honored in this day’s ceremony, or to guess it from some phrase of the introductions that Zeldor Luudwid provided. Where he could not come up with anything specific, he was always able, at least, to make some general remark that passed as appropriate. Thus, when the mayor of Khyntor in Zimroel came forward to be acclaimed for some undoubtedly significant municipal accomplishment, Prestimion had no recollection at all of what it was the good woman had done, but it was not a difficult matter for him to hold forth with great vigor on the famous bridges of Khyntor, those remarkable engineering feats, miraculously spanning the stupendous width of the River Zimr, that any child on Majipoor would have known something about. When a soul-painter from Sefarad who had done a celebrated series of canvasses depicting the tide-pools of Varfanir approached the throne, Prestimion realized that he had confused the man with another soul-painter famous for his portraits of ballerinas, and was not sure which was the tide-pool man and which the connoisseur of the dance. He offered, instead, a brief discourse on the marvels of soul-painting itself, speaking of the fascination he had for that medium, in which artists imprinted their visions on cunningly prepared psychosensitive fabric, and expressed his hope to do a little soul-painting himself one day when the cares of government permitted him the leisure to master the art. And so forth: one deft little speech after another, graceful, well turned, kingly, after which Zeldor Luudwid presented the honoree with the appropriate insignia of distinction, a bright riband or sparkling medallion or something of the like, and gently sent him back to his seat, pleasantly dazed by his encounter with greatness.
Simbilon Khayf was one of the last to be presented. For him, of course, Prestimion had no problems of memory. He spoke first of the importance of such private banks as Simbilon Khayf’s in stimulating the growth of entrepreneurial industry on Majipoor, and then turned easily to a synopsis of Simbilon Khayf’s own great achievement in rising from the humble ranks of the factory-workers of Stee to his present eminence in the world of finance. Simbilon Khayf’s eyes did not leave Prestimion’s as the Coronal delivered his encomium; and once again Prestimion wondered whether this shrewd, unpleasant man might somehow have succeeded in linking the crowned king high atop the throne before him with the bewhiskered merchant who had come to him at his mansion in Stee seeking a loan.