“I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said.
6
At any other time it would have been appropriate for Prestimion to spend at least a week at Alaisor. As Coronal, he certainly would have to be guest of honor at a banquet with Lord Mayor Hilgimuir in the famous Hall of Topaz and make the obligatory visit to the celebrated temple of the Lady on Alaisor Heights. And if he still had been only Prince of Muldemar, there would be a meeting with the great wine-shippers with whom his family had had commercial connections for so many generations; and so on.
But these were not ordinary times. He had to get quickly to the Isle. And so, although he would meet with the lord mayor, it would be only for an hour or two. He would skip the visit to the hilltop temple, since he would be seeing the Lady herself soon enough. As for the wine-merchants, they were irrelevant now that he was Coronal and no longer could be concerned with the family wine business. A single night in Alaisor was all that he could allow himself, and then they would be on their way.
The lord mayor had provided Prestimion and Varaile with the sumptuous four-level penthouse suite reserved exclusively for Powers of the Realm atop the thirty-story tower of the Alaisor Mercantile Exchange. All of Alaisor could be seen from its windows. Maundigand-Klimd and the rest of the Coronal’s entourage had been given lesser but still quite luxurious quarters nearby.
It was a city of high imperial grandeur, the greatest metropolitan center of the western coast. A line of massive towering cliffs of black granite ran parallel to the shore here. The Iyann had carved a deep canyon through that wall of black cliffs long ago in order to reach the sea; and Alaisor lay outspread like a giant fan at their base, spreading far along the shore to north and south, with the bay created by the Iyann’s mouth forming the city’s magnificent harbor. Grand boulevards ran on great diagonals through Alaisor city from its northern and southern extremities, converging in a circle at the waterfront. At that meeting-point stood six gigantic obelisks of black stone, marking the place where Stiamot, the conqueror of the Metamorphs, had been buried seven thousand years before. Prestimion pointed the monument out to Varaile from the balcony on the west side of the building, which gave them a view that overlooked the harbor.
The story was, he told her, that Stiamot, after becoming Pontifex, had decided in extreme old age to undertake a pilgrimage to Zimroel, to the Danipiur, the Metamorph high chieftain, for the sake of begging her forgiveness for the conquest. But his journey had ended here at Alaisor, where he fell ill and could not continue; and as he lay dying, looking outward toward the sea, he had asked to have his body laid to rest here instead of being carried thousands of miles eastward to the Labyrinth.
“And the temple of the Lady?” Varaile asked. “Where is that?”
They were on the uppermost floor of their suite. Prestimion led Varaile to the great curving eastern window, which faced the dark vertical wall of the cliffs. At this hour of the afternoon the westering sun bathed them in a bronzy-green sheen. “There,” he said. “Right below the rim—do you see?”
“Yes. Like a white eye staring at us out of the forehead of the hill. Have you ever been there, Prestimion?”
“Once. I visited Zimroel about a dozen years ago and spent a couple of weeks in Alaisor on the way, and Septach Melayn and I went up there. It’s a wonderful building, a slender curve of white marble one story high that seems to be hanging from the face of the cliff. You see the entire city laid out like its own map before you, and the sea beyond it, on and on halfway to the Isle.”
“It sounds marvelous. Couldn’t we go there just for a little while tomorrow?”
Prestimion smiled. “The Coronal can’t go anywhere ‘just for a little while.’ That building up there’s the second most sacred site on Majipoor. If I visited it at all, I’d have to stay overnight at the very least and meet with the Hierarch and her acolytes, and there’d be ceremonies and such, and all manner of other—well, you see how it is, Varaile. Whatever I do has heavy symbolic importance. And the ship to the Isle can’t wait: the winds are favorable to the west, and we need to leave tomorrow. Once the wind turns against you here, it can cause delays of many months, and I can’t risk that now. We can visit the temple the next time we’re in Alaisor.”
“And when will that be? The world is so big, Prestimion! Is there time for us ever to see the same place twice?”
“In four or five years,” he said, “when things are a little more settled in the world, it’ll be appropriate for me to make a grand processional, and we’ll go everywhere. I mean everywhere, Varaile. Even over to Zimroeclass="underline" Piliplok, Ni-moya, Dulorn, Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal. We’ll come through Alaisor again then, and we’ll stay longer. I promise you we will. Whatever we’ve missed on this trip we’ll see then.”
“ ‘We,’ you say. Does the Coronal’s wife go with him on the grand processional? Lord Confalume’s wife didn’t, when he came to Stee on his last processional.”
“Different Coronal. Different sort of wife. You’ll be at my side, Varaile, wherever I go.”
“That’s a firm promise?”
“A solemn vow. I swear it by Lord Stiamot’s whiskers. Here in the very shadow of his tomb.”
She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “I guess it’s settled, then,” she said.
He had never been to the Isle of Sleep. Indeed in his days as a prince of the Castle it had never occurred to him to go there. One did not ordinarily go to the Isle unless one had some special need to undergo a rite of purification. It was not even customary for Coronals to visit it unless they were making a grand processional, and it was too soon in his reign for that.
But now the Isle was rising before him on the horizon like a wondrous white wall, and the sight of it set strange excitement churning within him.
“You will be surprised at how big it is,” everyone who had been there constantly said. And so, having been duly warned, Prestimion expected not to be surprised; but he was, all the same. An island, he had always thought, was a body of land that was completely surrounded by water, and islands were usually fairly small. The Isle of Sleep was a big island, everyone said, and he interpreted that to mean a very large body of land that was completely surrounded by water. But he still visualized it as something whose borders could be perceived as curving away on all sides to the ocean. In fact, though, the Isle was immense, so big that on any other world it would have been called a continent. Seen from out here in the sea, it certainly seemed to have a continent’s vast extent. It was only by comparison with Alhanroel, Zimroel, and Suvrael, the three officially designated continents of Majipoor, that anyone could have thought of giving the Isle any lesser designation.
One of the many wonderful stories that they told about the Isle was that in distant ancient times—millions of years ago, before there had been Shapeshifters, even, on Majipoor—it all had lain far below the surface of the sea, but had been thrust upward into the air in a single day and a single night by some awesome convulsion of the world’s interior. Which was why it was so sacred a place: the hand of the Divine had taken hold of it and brought it forth from the waters.
The undersea origin of the Isle could not be doubted. It was attested to by the fact that the entire place was a single enormous mass of chalk many hundreds of miles across and more than half a mile high, having the form of three giant circular tiers set one atop the next; and chalk is a substance made up of the shells of microscopic creatures of the sea.