“Difficult is what I am, my friend.”
“For me. A favor. Let him ask you a few questions. This is more important than you can possibly know. The future of Majipoor may depend on it.”
“I doubt that. But for me my not seeing him is more important than you can possibly know. Let me be, Stiamot.”
“A few questions, only. I’ve promised him I’ll bring you. Come. Come, Mundiveen.”
“Well—”
Stiamot saw him weakening. Some powerful inner struggle was going on; but as the moments passed Mundiveen’s resistance appeared to be diminishing. Refusing a royal command was evidently something that even the crusty, acerbic Mundiveen was unwilling to do. Or perhaps it was merely the fierce lofty indifference that seemed to underlie everything he said or did, that cosmic shrug with which he faced the world, that led him ultimately to yield.
“Give me half an hour to get myself ready,” Mundiveen said. But the meeting was a brief and unhappy one. Mundiveen was strangely tense and withdrawn during the journey to the Residency, saying almost nothing. He came limping into the Coronal’s chamber with Stiamot beside him, and when he saw Strelkimar he shot a look of such coruscating hatred at him as Stiamot had never seen in human eyes. Strelkimar, who was poring over a sheaf of newly arrived dispatches, took no notice. He barely looked up, greeting Mundiveen with no more than a grunt and a casual glance, and signalled that he wanted to continue reading for a moment. One had to grant a Coronal such whims, but Stiamot knew that Mundiveen was no man to honor even a Coronal’s whim, and half expected him to turn indignantly and leave. Surprisingly, though, he simply stood and waited, a tightly controlled figure, practically motionless, his breath coming in a harsh rasp, and at last the Coronal looked up again. This time, when his eyes met Mundiveen’s, some violent unreadable emotion—shock, anger, despair?—swirled for an instant across Lord Strelkimar’s face. Then it vanished, and was replaced by a steely fixed stare. He stared at Mundiveen with a terrible piercing force that reminded Stiamot of the look that that Metamorph had given him in the street. But despite the grim power of that stare Strelkimar seemed somehow unnerved by Mundiveen’s presence, confounded, dazed.
“You are the expert on Shapeshifters?” the Coronal asked finally, in a low, husky voice.
“If that is what your man tells you, my lord, I will not deny it.”
“Ah. Ah.” A long silence. He was still staring. Another string of unfathomable emotions played across his features, a twitching of his lip, a clenching of his jaw. He was holding some inward debate with himself. Then the Coronal shook his head, slowly, the way a man at the last extremity of exhaustion might shake it. He was barely audible as he said, not to Mundiveen but to Stiamot, “It was a mistake to call him here. This is not a good moment for a meeting. I find myself very weary, this morning.”
“If you say so, my lord.”
“Very weary indeed. The man can go. Perhaps another time, then.”
He made a gesture of dismissal.
Stiamot was dumfounded. To ask that Mundiveen be brought, and then to react like this, and send him away so hastily—!
But Mundiveen did not seem troubled by the discourtesy. If anything, he appeared to be relieved to take his leave of the Coronal. Stiamot saluted and they went from the room, and, outside, Mundiveen said, “I wondered how he’d react when he saw me. Took him a moment to recognize me, I suppose. How awful he looked. By the Divine, what a haunted look there is in that man’s eyes! And for good reason, let me tell you.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that—” Stiamot paused. “He recognized you, you say? He’s seen you before?” Acidly Mundiveen said, “I told you I was at court, in the time before he was Coronal. And for a little while afterward. You don’t remember my saying that?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I must have forgotten it.”
“I wish I could. We go a long way back, your Coronal and I.” Stiamot passed his hand across his forehead as though to clear it from cobwebs. “You need to tell me what this is all about.”
“I do? I need to? The same way I needed to go and see Lord Strelkimar?”
“For the love of the Divine, Mundiveen—”
Mundiveen let his eyes slip closed for an instant. “All right. Let’s go have a bowl or two of wine, then, and I’ll tell you.”
“Wine? This early in the day?”
“Wine, Prince Stiamot. Or no story.”
“All right,” Stiamot said. “Wine.”
Mundiveen said, “I wasn’t always twisted up like this, you know. In the days when Lord Thrykeld was Coronal I was quite an athlete, as a matter of fact. And when I was on a surveying trip I could walk miles and miles without the slightest fatigue.”
“Back when you were a mining engineer.”
“When I was a mining engineer, yes. At least you remembered that much. I was going to find the world’s biggest iron mine, I thought. Not that Lord Thrykeld cared very much about that. All he cared about, really, was poetry and singing and his Ghayrog favorite. Do you know about that, the Ghayrog? Before your time, I suppose. But no matter. Thrykeld was the Coronal Lord, and I served him as loyally as you seem to serve Strelkimar, and I was going to present him with more iron than had ever been discovered before.”
Mundiveen helped himself liberally to the wine. He seemed calm, icily controlled, betraying no sign of the ferocious rage that had come over him in his first moment in the Coronal’s presence. Stiamot waited, saying nothing.
“The former Coronal, Lord Thrykeld,” Mundiveen said at last. “I suppose history will call him a great fool. You probably know very little about him.”
“Not much, really,” said Stiamot. “Only the standard information.”
“Then you must think he was a great fool. Most people do. Well, probably he was. But he was a gentle, sweet man, with a considerable gift for poetry and music. The people loved him. Everyone loved him. You must have loved him yourself, when you were a boy. But in the third or fourth year of his reign something began to change in him. There was this Ghayrog at court, a certain Valdakko, some sort of conjurer, I think. The Coronal spent more and more time with him, and then he brought him into the Council. Well, that was a little unusual, a Ghayrog in the Council. There never had been one before. They have equality under the law, of course, but they are reptilian, you know. Their metabolisms aren’t like ours and neither are their minds. Thrykeld’s cousin Strelkimar was High Counsellor then, and I can tell you, he wasn’t pleased when the Coronal began to jump this Valdakko up like that. He took it as well as anyone could, though. But when Thrykeld decided that he wanted the Ghayrog to be High Counsellor in Strelkimar’s place, things got, shall we say, a little tense.”
“I heard about that,” Stiamot said. “The Ghayrog as High Counsellor.”
Mundiveen had finished his first bowl of wine, though Stiamot had had only a few sips of his. He went to work on a second one, savoring the wine, pondering it, seemingly lost in recollection of a far-off time. At length he began to speak again. “Strelkimar was very diplomatic about it all, at least outwardly. He behaved as though his cousin was just going through a phase. He loved Thrykeld, you know—as I said, we all loved him; a kind, good man—but gradually it became clear that the Coronal had become unstable, was slipping over, in fact, into a kind of megalomania.” Mundiveen went on to describe how, urged on by his Ghayrog counsellor, Lord Thrykeld had promulgated a law giving him the power to annul any previous statute without consent of the Council. This was absolutism; it was something entirely new in the history of the world. Strelkimar and a few of the other counsellors then made their objections known, objected very strongly, Mundiveen said, and Thrykeld—a Thrykeld none of them had ever known before—retaliated immediately, dismissing the entire Council except for the Ghayrog. He intended to rule, he announced, by personal decree.