The banquet to which we were bound on that particular evening was one of the frequent ceremonial functions tradition required of the Jewel City monarch.
The life of the princess was bound to every side by centuries-old patterns of enormously complicated tradition and ritual. Periodically, the Princess of Phaolon was required to feast representatives of the several aristocracies of her realm; I have no idea as to the reason why. It may have been something in the nature of a renewal of the aristocrats in their rank, or a symbolic token of the interdependency of the sovereign and the aristocracies, ritualized by their sharing of a common meal, or something to do with the national religion, which as yet I understood imperfectly.
At any rate, such occasions were a crashing bore, interminable evening-long meals of thirty or forty courses, interspersed with flowery speeches, ceremonial dances and poetry recitals, elaborate courtesies, and obscure traditional gestures, such as the pouring of three drops from every winecup into silver salvers borne around the banquet hall by an endless succession of pages, for no conceivable reason or purpose.
Certain different incenses were burned during certain courses by Laonese priests in elaborately different robes and accouterments stationed at small altars situated here and there. Something like spruce gum was burned during a course of small cubes of beef-like meat in cream sauce, skewered with tiny silver forks; a thickly odorous incense like myrrh was sizzled in golden pans during a course of breaded fish; a sharp and pungent perfume, like pine needles, was poured on braziers of coals during yet another course consisting of small slivers of sweet white meat cooked in sugary wine.
The elaborately artificial aspects of these interminable banquets was unendurable. Nobody knew why or how these customs had arisen, but arisen they had, and, once hallowed by a few centuries of tradition, a facet of behavior became crystallized in Laonese society and was there to stay.
Luckily for me, during the early phases of my education when I was still largely unfamiliar with the language, no one required me to deliver any of the lengthy speeches, flowery compliments, or recitals of national poetry, which droned on more or less constantly during the succession of courses. I was politely ignored during these banquets, for it was thought that a ritual period of acclimatization was required of one who had but recently returned from the World Above, as the Laonese conception of heaven is termed. So I just nibbled at the various courses, guzzled wine, and tried to ignore the so-called festivities.
Custom, ritual, precedent, and tradition rule the Laonese aristocracies and, to a lesser extent, the common folk, and this endlessly complicated code of ceremonial behavior controlled and governed virtually every phase and detail of everyday life. In this, as in certain other things, it resembled the Chinese civilization of the imperial periods.
I use the plural, “aristocracies,” because the Laonese society was an hierarchical one, made up of a number of different ranks. There were, for example, what might be called the landed gentry—members of ancient families with an hereditary claim to certain territories of the realm. Members of this aristocracy were known as the thurkuz. Their highest ranking member and most vocal spokesman was a stiff-necked old woman, the Kyra Vaonica du Kaikoos, which translates as Lady (or Dame) Vaonica of Kaikoos; she was a sort of duchess.
The second aristocracy was made up of those families descended from Laonese patriots or heroes who had been ennobled for their services to the throne, just as English monarchs have bestowed titles on their war heroes like Lord Nelson or the Duke of Wellington. The custom of honoring outstanding heroes with ranks and titles was popular among earlier Laonese sovereigns, but had died out somewhat lately. However, these honors were of a different kind and nature from those of the thurkuz, the landed gentry. This second aristocracy was called the aophet, which means something like “sprung from the heroes.” In my incarnation as Lord Chong, I belonged to this particular aristocracy myself. In fact, I now took precedence as highest ranking peer and spokesman of the aophet, displacing a suave baron named Iohom who had been senior lord of the aophet before my revivification.
There was a third aristocracy whose difference from the others was a subtle one, so subtle I never quite managed to grasp the difference. It consisted of those with titular honors, some exceedingly fanciful, others thoroughly devoid of meaning as far as I could see. This particular aristocracy, the iophua, held hereditary honors such as Lord Custodian of the Nine Ivory Batons, or Privy Guardian of the Silver Book of Hshan, or High Steward of the Scarlet Flask, and so on.
A tradition-encrusted people, the Laonese! For never once did I see the Lord Custodian with a baton of any kind, much less an ivory one. The High Steward bad a noticeable fondness for the wine flask, all right, but I never saw him with a scarlet one. And as for the Privy Guardian, from the way be usually snored through the poetry recitals, I cannot conceive of him as possessing interest in any book, much less Hshan’s.
There leas one thing that could be said for these formal banquets, and that was that they gave me a chance to see Niamh.
At these functions, the Laonese dine from low taborets while seated cross-legged on cushions. But the princess and I, as only befitting our superior degree, sat in regular chairs at opposite ends of a dais. I thus had the pleasant opportunity to feast my eyes on her while feasting my belly.
How lovely she was! Sapling-slim, demure, exquisite as a fairy princess. I have had little to do with women; during my life on Earth, as a cripple, it seemed to me impossible that I could ever be anything other than an object of either pity or contempt in the eyes of a beautiful woman. Desiring to be neither, I avoided their company, although my appetite was as normal as that of any whole and healthy man. Now I basked in the bliss of her nearness, and the shy sidewise looks she sometimes cast at me, demurely, from under silken lashes, did not escape me. How wondrous strange it was, to feel myself the object of a beautiful girl’s admiration! How thrilling to know myself tall and strong, a hero, a warrior of immortal deeds, in the eyes of all who looked upon me!
At times I questioned my wisdom in lingering here on the World of the Green Star. I was not the mythic Hercules they fancied me to be, but a strange wanderer come hence on a weird voyage, caught in a body that was not my own, enjoying the worship and adulation which belonged to someone else. I feel certain that the old sage, Khin-nom, doubted the truth of my revivification. Suppose questions were asked of me concerning my first life as Lord Chong—questions I could not answer, bearing on a life that I had never lived? Would it not be wiser for me to quit this borrowed body and return to take up the life that was my own?
I hesitated—I lingered—I procrastinated; and can any wonder that I put off returning to the body of a cripple, turning my back on this weird and gorgeous world of mile-high trees, jewelbox cities, and elfin knights mounted on dragonflies? For what was there for me to go home to, but a dreary life of books and dreams, prisoned in a paralyzed carcass that could not take a step without assistance?
And so I stayed on...and lost my heart.
Time and again I puzzled over the meaning of that dramatic scene I had interrupted with my involuntary resurrection. What was the substance of that tense confrontation I had spied upon unseen, when the cold-faced man in robes of eye-hurting yellow, crowned with spiky black crystals, had stood in challenge before the tall throne of Phaolon and hurled his insolence in the flower-like face of Niamh the Fair?
The elderly philosopher but tugged at his indigo beard, avoiding my questions by ignoring them and pressing on with our unremitting language lessons. Captain Panthon, usually my prime source of information, seemed oddly reluctant to reply to my queries. I have since concluded that his reluctance was in deference to hallowed tradition: men of the khaweng-ya, the warrior class, do not discuss high matters; the doings of their lords and betters are subjects unfit for gossip or speculation.
Bit by bit I pieced together a patchwork picture of the situation, gathering hints and clues from a careless word let fall in my presence, a scrap of conversation overheard, or veiled references murmured when I was not supposed to be listening.
The man in the yellow robes, it seemed, had been Akhmim, who was the prince of another tree-city called Ardha. His ultimatum was a marriage proposal!
It seems that precedent and tradition hallow the masculine gender, alone deemed fit to wield sovereignty. A Queen regnant is a novelty unheard-of in all the placid millennia of Laonese annals. It is not exactly that a woman ruler is forbidden by any law of gods or men: it is simply something new and strange and different. And to the timid, ephemeral Laonese, whose lives are dominated by ritual and antique custom, the new and novel is anathema, or at least highly suspect.
Niamh was a slave to custom, too; but it is the art of a monarch to interpret tradition in support of the royal will. And the will of princes is less subject to the ghostly authority of the past than are the wills of those who are accustomed to being ruled over by princes.
For ages a tension has stretched between the two treecities. Nothing so overt as war—that custom happily is most rare here on the World of the Green Star—but a certain rivalry, an unease. The folk of Phaolon, then, were on the horns of a particularly galling dilemma. On the one hand, every precept of custom and tradition cried out that a princess could not rule alone; on the other, they loathed the notion of yielding the hand of their beloved Niamh to the unwelcome and unloved Tyrant-Prince of Ardha.
Niamh had weighed the custom of masculine rule against the traditional envy and suspicion the folk of Phaolon felt for the men of Ardha, and had chosen the course of action least offensive to tradition—she would rule alone.
On the day of my resurrection, Akhmim of Ardha had come with an ultimatum. The benign will of the World Above, the unanimous precedent of a thousand regnant kings, the crushing weight of age-old authority, demanded she wed a prince of her rank and yield primacy to him. Only the shadowy divinities of the World Above knew what shattering thunderbolts of calamity and cataclysm would ensue, if a woman maintained her grasp on the throne of Phaolon in blind defiance of tradition and holy precedent. Did the Princess Niamh, in her mad arrogance and folly, possess some secret sign from heaven that the World Above would tolerate her mad ambition? Akhmim cried aloud to the Green Star for some token or omen that heaven favored her in her folly—
And in that fateful moment, I thundered to life in my tomb!
Small wonder that at the time I sensed my coming forth had disconcerted Akhmim, throwing him off-balance. “Off-balance” indeed! He had been petrified with horror, frozen with unbelieving shock. What sign could have been more dramatic than my springing to life, the shards of my splintered sarcophagus ringing about me on the glistening pave?
None could blame the Princess of Phaolon for interpreting my miraculous return to the lands of the living as a sign from the World Above. The timing of the event alone confirmed it. A more sensationally dramatic affirmation of Niamh’s sacred right to her throne could hardly have been imagined than the sudden reincarnation of the mighty Chong, hero of a thousand legends, the mythic defender of her own great dynasty in the age of her forefathers.
Akhmim, crushed, shaken to the core, had fled the hall in confusion, and no word had come from him since.
But his shadow lay over the Jewel City like a grim pall, like a cold gloom of ominous fate to come. So close had
Akhmim stood to the throne he coveted, so swift had fate snatched it from his grasp, that few could doubt he would not seek again to fulfill his desires. And in his path, I stood alone!