The coronation ceremony, with its ancient ritual incantations and investitures and ringing trumpet-calls, and the climactic donning of the crown and the royal robes, had ended fifty minutes ago. Now came a space of several hours in the festivities before the celebratory coronation feast. There was a furious, noisy bustling and hustling throughout the vastness of the great building that from this day onward would be known to the world as Lord Prestimion's Castle, as the thousands of guests and the thousands of servitors made ready for that evening's grand banquet. Only the new Coronal himself stood apart and alone, in a sphere of echoing silence.

After all the strife and turmoil of civil war, the usurpation and the battles and the defeats and the heartbreak, the hour of victory had come. Prestimion was the anointed Coronal of Majipoor at last, and eager to take up his new tasks.

But--to his great surprise--something troublesome, something profoundly unsettling, had surfaced within him in this glorious hour. The sense of relief and achievement that he had felt at the knowledge that his reign was finally beginning was, he realized, being unexpectedly tempered by a strange core of uneasiness. Why, though? Uneasiness over what? This was his moment of triumph, and he should be rejoic-ing. And yet--even so--

A powerful hunger for privacy amid all the frenzy of the day had come over him toward the end of the coronation ceremony, and, when it was over, he had abruptly gone off to sequester himself in the immensity of the Great Hall of Lord Hendighail, where he could be alone. That huge room was where the celebratory gifts that had been arriving steadily all month, a river of wonderful things flowing toward the Castle without cease from every province of Majipoor, lay piled in glittering array.

Prestimion had only the haziest notion of when Lord Hendighail had lived--seven, eight, nine hundred years before, something like that--and none at all of the man's life and deeds. But it was obvious that Hendighail had believed in doing things on a colossal scale. The Hendighail Hall was one of the biggest rooms in the entire enormous Castle, a mighty chamber ten times as long as it was wide, and lofty in proportion, with a planked ceiling of red ghakka-timber supported by groined vaults of black stone whose intricately interwoven traceries were lost in the dimness far overhead.

The Castle, though, was a city in itself, with busy central districts and old, half-forgotten peripheral ones, and Lord Hendighail had caused his great hall to be built on the northern side of Castle Mount, which was the wrong side, the obscure side. Prestimion, although he had lived at the Mount most of his life, could not remember ever having set foot in the Hendighail Hall before this day. In modern times it had been used mainly as a storage depot, where objects that had not yet found their proper places were kept. Which was how it was being employed today: a warehouse for the tribute coming in from all over the world for the new Coronal.

It was packed now with the most astounding assortment of things, a fantastic display of the color and wonder of Majipoor. The custom was, when a new ruler came to the throne, for all the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor to vie with one another in bestowing gifts of great splendor upon him. But this time--so said the old ones, the ones whose memories went back more than forty years to the last coronation--they had outdone themselves in generosity. What had arrived thus far was three, five, ten times as much as might have been expected. Prestimion felt stunned and dazed by the profusion of it all.