The haunted look in Abrigant’s eyes was an awful thing to behold.
“Do you have any idea what could have driven him to it?” Prestimion asked. He had barely begun to come to terms with the whole thing himself.
In a guarded voice Abrigant replied, “It was a fit of madness, of a kind that had been coming upon him more and more often. That is all I would care to say, brother. Dekkeret will speak with you about it in more detail later. But come: here are the floaters that will take us to Muldemar House.” He gestured toward Varaile and Fiorinda, who had taken up a place just to Prestimion’s left throughout the conversation, and were standing silently while Prestimion and Abrigant spoke. “Here, my sisters—”
The two women had rarely left each other’s side during the journey from the Labyrinth. Both of them were swathed in the yellow robes of mourning, and both seemed so grief-stricken still that there was no way a stranger could have told which one was the widow of the late prince, and which merely the sister-in-law. Fiorinda’s three small children, two girls and a boy of five, huddled behind their mother, peeping out shyly, showing little comprehension of the tragedy that had overtaken their family. “This floater is yours,” Abrigant told them. He ushered them toward it. The Lady Tuanelys and young Prince Simbilon would travel with their mother and aunt and cousins also. “And I will ride with the Pontifex in this one,” he said, indicating his own floater. Prestimion entered it, and his two older sons climbed in beside him, and Abrigant gave the vehicle the command to proceed.
Abrigant seemed to unwind and expand during the course of the journey from Muldemar city to the estate itself. Perhaps he was relieved, at this dark time, to have his elder brother arrive to assume some of his burdens.
He complimented Prestimion on how much his children had grown and how well they looked. Young Taradath was indeed beginning to look quite princely, and Prince Akbalik also, though Simbilon still seemed far from getting his growth. And it did not seem to Prestimion that the Lady Tuanelys, who had been suffering lately from nightmares that had a troublesome resemblance to the dreams of the sort Teotas had supposedly been having, looked at all well. Disturbing dreams had begun to afflict Varaile also, lately. But Prestimion said nothing about that to Abrigant.
“And this year’s wines!” Abrigant was saying. He sounded almost exuberant now. “Wait until you sample them, Prestimion! A year of years, a year for the ages! The red in particular, as I was saying to Teotas only—last—month—”
His voice slowed and then halted in mid-sentence. All exuberance vanished and the haunted look abruptly returned to his eyes.
Prestimion said quickly, “Ah, look there, Abrigant: Muldemar House! How beautiful it is! How much I’ve missed being here!” It was as though he felt it was his task, not only as Pontifex but as the eldest of the family, to keep Abrigant from sinking into despondency.
To his two sons he said: “I was born here, you know. This evening I’ll show you the rooms where I used to live.” As if they had never seen the place before; but his concern now was merely to distract Abrigant from his sorrow.
Prestimion himself, laboring under his own sharp sense of great loss, felt lifted from his dark mood by the sight of his boyhood home.
Who could fail to respond to the extraordinary beauty of the vale of Muldemar? Amidst all the varied splendors of Castle Mount it stood out as a place of grace and calm. It was bordered on one side by the broad face of the Mount itself, and on the other by Kudarmar Ridge, a secondary peak of the Mount that would, anywhere else in the world, have been regarded as a mountain of majesty and grandeur in its own right. Lying as it did in the sheltered pocket between those two lofty peaks, Muldemar vale was favored all the year round by soft breezes and gentle mists, and its soil ran rich and deep.
Prestimion’s ancestors had settled here even before the Castle itself existed. They were farmers, then, who had come up from the lowlands with cuttings of the grapevines they grew down there. Over the centuries their wines had established a reputation for themselves as the foremost ones of Majipoor, and grateful Coronals, over the centuries, had ennobled the vintners of Muldemar, bringing them upward eventually to be dukes and then princes. Prestimion was the first of his line who had gone on to hold the Coronal’s throne, and after it the Pontifical seat.
The family lands ran for many miles through the choicest zone of the vale, a broad green realm stretching from the Zemulikkaz River to the Kudarmar Ridge. Deep within the estate lay the white walls and soaring black towers of Muldemar House itself, a domain of two hundred rooms laid out in three sprawling wings.
Abrigant had been thoughtful enough to provide Prestimion with the rooms that once had been his, a second-level apartment that looked out through gleaming windows of faceted quartz to the great vista of Sambattinola Hill. Little had changed here since he last had occupied it, more than twenty years before: the walls still bore the same subtle murals in quiet shades of amethyst and azure and topaz pink, and the window seat in which the young Prestimion had spent so many pleasant hours was furnished with some of the same books that he had read there long ago.
Household servants whom Prestimion did not recognize, no doubt the sons and daughters of the ones he had known, were on hand to help the Pontifex and his family settle in. This caused a minor clash with Prestimion’s own staff, for custom required that the Pontifex bring his own servants with him wherever he traveled, and they guarded that prerogative jealously. “You may not enter,” said sturdy strapping Falco, who had the title of First Imperial Steward now, and took his promotion very seriously. “These rooms belong to the Pontifex, and you may not look upon him.” It saddened Prestimion to see these good people of Muldemar staring timidly at him over Falco’s shoulder in awe and wonder, as though he were not a man of Muldemar himself but had descended into their midst from some other planet; and he instructed Falco that it was his intention, in this house, to waive the usual Pontifical prerogatives and allow ordinary common citizens to have access to his presence. Falco did not like that at all.
Varaile and Prestimion would share the master bedroom; Varaile put Tuanelys, who awakened often now crying in the night, in the room just adjacent. Taradath, Akbalik, and Simbilon were left to shift for themselves beyond. It was a suite of many rooms.
“I wish I could have Fiorinda nearby me as well,” Varaile said.
Prestimion smiled. “I know you’re accustomed to her presence close at hand. But this apartment was not designed to provide space for a lady-in-waiting when I lived in it. Would that it had been, but that was not how things were done.”
“It’s not for myself that I want Fiorinda near,” said Varaile, with a bit of snap in her voice. “She’s the one in need of comfort, and I wish that I could give it.”
“They’ll have put her in the rooms she and Teotas usually had when they were here. No doubt she’ll have a maid of her own to look after her there.”
But Varaile could not put Fiorinda from her mind. “How she suffers, Prestimion. And I as well. Teotas would never have undertaken that walk in the night if she had been beside him. But Fiorinda and Teotas were apart all those weeks before he—died, and the fault was mine. I should never have taken her with me from the Castle.”
“The separation was meant to be only temporary. And who could guess that Teotas had it in him to destroy himself?”
Varaile threw a strange look his way. “Is that what he did?”
“Why would a man climb out onto a dangerous and almost inaccessible tower in the middle of the night, if not to destroy himself?”