Guidrag made a rough but eloquent speech of welcome on behalf of all her shipmates and fellow dragon-hunters and presented Valentine with an elaborately carved necklace made from interlocking sea-dragon bones. Afterward he gave thanks for this grand naval display, and asked her why the dragon-ship fleet was idle here in Piliplok harbor and not out hunting on the high seas; to which she replied that this year’s migration had brought the dragons past the coast in such astonishing and unprecedented numbers that all the dragonships had fulfilled their lawful quotas in the first few weeks of the hunt; their season had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
“This has been a strange year,” said Guidrag. “And I fear more strangeness awaits us, my lord.”
The escort of dragon-ships stayed close by, all the way to port. The royal party came ashore at Malibor Pier, in the center of the harbor, where a welcoming party waited: the duke of the province with a vast retinue, the mayor of the city and an equally vast swarm of officials, and a delegation of dragon-captains from the ships that had accompanied the Coronal to shore. Valentine entered into the ceremonies and rituals of greetings like one who dreams that he is awake: he responded gravely and courteously and at all the right times, he conducted himself with serenity and poise, and yet it was as though he moved through a throng of phantoms.
The highway from the harbor to the great hall of the city, where Valentine was to lodge, was lined with thick scarlet ropes to keep back the throngs, and guards were posted everywhere. Valentine, riding in an open-topped floater with Carabella at his side, thought that he had never heard such clamor, a constant incomprehensible roar of jubilant welcome so thunderous that it took his mind away, for the moment, from thoughts of crisis. But the respite lasted only a short while, for as soon as he was settled in his quarters he asked that the latest dispatches be brought him, and the news they contained was unrelievedly grim.
The lusavender blight, he learned, had spread somehow into the quarantined unaffected provinces. The stajja harvest was going to be half normal this year. A pest called the wireworm, long thought eradicated, had entered the regions where thuyol, an important forage crop, was grown: ultimately that would threaten the supply of meat. A fungus that attacked grapes had caused widespread dropping of unripe fruit in the wine country of Khyntor and Ni-moya. All of Zimroel now was affected by some sort of agricultural disturbance, except only the area of the remote southwest around the tropical city of Narabal.
Y-Uulisaan, when Valentine had showed him the reports, said gravely, “It will not be contained now. These are ecologically interlocking events: Zimroel’s food supply will be totally disrupted, my lord.”
“There are eight billion people in Zimroel!”
“Indeed. And when these blights spread to Al-hanroel—?” Valentine felt a chill. “You think they will?”
“Ah, my lord, I know they will! How many ships go back and forth between the continents each week? How many birds and even insects make the crossing? The Inner Sea is not that broad, and the Isle and the archipelagos make useful halfway houses.” With a strangely serene smile the agricultural expert said, “I tell you, my lord, this cannot be resisted, this cannot be defeated. There will be starvation. There will be plague. Majipoor will be devoured.”
“No. Not so.”
“If I could give you comforting words, I would. I have no comfort for you, Lord Valentine.” The Coronal stared intently into Y-Uulisaan’s strange eyes. “The Divine has brought this catastrophe upon us,” he said. “The Divine will take it from us.”
“Perhaps. But not before there has been great damage. My lord, I ask permission to withdraw. May I study these papers an hour or so?”
When Y-Uulisaan had gone, Valentine sat quietly for a time, thinking through one last time the thing that he was intending to do, and which now seemed more urgent than ever, in the face of these calamitous new reports. Then he summoned Sleet and Tunigorn and Deliamber.
“I mean to change the route of the processional,” he said without preamble.
They looked warily toward one another, as though they had been expecting for weeks some such sort of troublesome surprise.
“We will not go on to Ni-moya at this time. Cancel all arrangements for Ni-moya and beyond.” He saw them staring at him in a tense and somber way, and knew he would not win their support without a struggle. “On the Isle of Sleep,” he continued, “it was made manifest to me that the blights that have come upon Zimroel, and which may before long come upon Alhanroel as well, are a direct demonstration of the displeasure of the Divine. You, Deliamber, raised that point with me long ago, when we were at the Velalisier ruins, and you suggested that the troubles of the realm that had grown from the usurpation of my throne might be the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs. We have gone a long way here on Majipoor, you said, without paying the price for the original sin of the conquerors, and now chaos was upon us because the past was starting to send us its reckoning at last, with compound interest added.”
“So I remember. Those were my words, almost exactly.”
“And I said,” Valentine went on, “that I would dedicate my reign to making reparations for the injustices we visited upon the Metamorphs. But I have not done that. I have been preoccupied with other problems, and have made only the most superficial of gestures toward entering into an understanding with the Shapeshifters. And while I delayed, our punishment has intensified. Now that I am on Zimroel, I intend to go at once to Piurifayne—”
“To Piurifayne, my lord?” said Sleet and Tunigorn in virtually the same instant.
“To Piurifayne, to the Shapeshifter capital at Ilirivoyne. I will meet with the Danipiur. I will hear her demands, and take cognizance of them. I—”
“No Coronal has ever gone into Metamorph territory before,” Tunigorn cut in.
“One Coronal has,” said Valentine. “In my time as a juggler I was there, and performed, in fact, before an audience of Metamorphs and the Danipiur herself.”
“A different matter,” Sleet said. “You could do anything you pleased, when you were a juggler. That time we went among the Shapeshifters, you scarce believed you were Coronal yourself. But now that you are undoubted Coronal—”
“I will go. As a pilgrimage of humility, as the beginning of an act of atonement.”
“My lord—!” Sleet sputtered.
Valentine smiled. “Go ahead. Give me all the arguments against it. I’ve been expecting for weeks to have a long dreary debate with you three about this, and now I suppose the time has come. But let me tell you this first: when we are done speaking, I will go to Piurifayne.”
“And nothing will shake you?” Tunigorn asked. “If we speak of the dangers, the breach of protocol, the possible adverse political consequences, the—”
“No. No. No. Nothing will shake me. Only by kneeling before the Danipiur can I bring an end to the disaster that is ravaging Zimroel.”
“Are you so sure, my lord,” said Deliamber, “that it will be as simple as that?”
“It is something that must be tried. Of that I am convinced, and you will never shake me from my resolve.”
“My lord,” Sleet said, “It was the Shapeshifters that witched you off your throne, or so I do recall it, and I think you have some recollection of it also. Now the world stands at the edge of madness, and you propose to offer yourself up into their hands, in their own trackless forests. Does that seem—”
“Wise? No. Necessary? Yes, Sleet. Yes. One Coronal more or less doesn’t matter. There are many others who can take my place and do as well, or better. But the destiny of Majipoor matters. I must go to Ilirivoyne.”
“I beg you, my lord—”
“I beg you,” said Valentine. “We have talked enough. My mind is set on this.”
“You will go to Piurifayne,” said Sleet in disbelief. “You will offer yourself to the Shapeshifters.”
“Yes,” Valentine said. “I will offer myself to the Shapeshifters.”
The Book of the Broken Sky
MILLILAIN WOULD ALWAYS remember the day when the first of the new Coronals proclaimed himself, because that was the day she paid five crowns for a couple of grilled sausages.
She was on her way at noon to meet her husband Kristofon at his shop on the esplanade by Khyntor Bridge. It was the beginning of the third month of the Shortage. That was what everyone in Khyntor called it, the Shortage, but inwardly Mililain had had a more realistic name for it: the famine. No one was starving—yet—but no one was getting enough to eat, either, and the situation seemed to be worsening daily. The night before last, she and Kristofon had eaten nothing but some porridge he had made out of dried calimbots and a bit of ghumba root. Tonight’s dinner would be stajja pudding. And tomorrow—who knew? Kristofon was talking of going hunting for small animals, mistunes, droles, things of that sort, in Prestimion Park. Filet of mintun? Roast breast of drole? Millilain shuddered. Lizard stew would be next, probably. With boiled cabbage-tree leaves on the side.
She came down Ossier Boulevard to the place where it turned into Zimr Way, which led to the bridge esplanade. And just as she passed the Proctorate office the unmistakable and irresistible aroma of grilled sausages came to her.
I’m hallucinating, she thought. Or dreaming, maybe.
Once there had been dozens of sausage peddlers along the esplanade. But not for weeks, now, had Millilain seen one. Meat was hard to come by these days: something about cattle starving in the western ranching country for lack of forage, and livestock shipments from Suvrael, where things still seemed to be all right, being disrupted by the sea-dragon herds that were thronging the maritime lanes.
But the smell of those sausages was very authentic. Millilain stared in all directions, seeking its source.
Yes! There!
No hallucination. No dream. Incredibly, astoundingly, a sausage peddler had emerged onto the esplanade, a little stoop-shouldered Liiman with a dented old cart in which long red sausages hung skewered over a charcoal fire. He was standing there just as if everything in the world were exactly as it had always been. As if there were no Shortage. As if the food shops had not gone on a three-hour-a-day schedule, because that was usually how long it took them to sell out everything they had in stock.
Millilain began to run.
Others were running too. From all sides of the esplanade they converged on the sausage peddler as though he were giving away ten-royal pieces. But in fact what he had to offer was far more precious than any shiny silver coin could be.
She ran as she had never run before, elbows flailing, knees coming up high, hair streaming out behind her. At least a hundred people were heading toward the Liiman and his cart. He couldn’t possibly have enough sausages for everyone. But Millilain was closer than anyone else: she had seen the vendor first, she was running the hardest. A long-legged Hjort woman was coming up close behind her, and a Skandar in an absurd business suit was thundering in from the side, grunting as he ran. Who could ever have imagined a time, Millilain wondered, when you’d run to buy sausages from a street vendor?
The Shortage—the famine—had started somewhere out west, in the Rift country. At first it had seemed unimportant and almost unreal to Millilain, since it was happening so far away, in places that were themselves unreal to her. She had never been west of Thagobar. When the first reports came in, she had felt a certain abstract compassion for the people who were said to be going hungry in Mazadone and Dulorn and Falkynkip, but it was hard for her to believe that it was actually happening—nobody ever went hungry on Majipoor, after all—and whenever word came of some new crisis out west, a riot or a mass migration or an epidemic, it struck her as being remote not only in space but in time, not something taking place right this moment but more like something out of a history book, an event of Lord Staimot’s time, say, thousands of years ago.
But then Millilain began to find that there were days when things like niyk and hingamorts and glein were in short supply at the places where she shopped. It’s because of the crop failures out west, the clerks told her: nothing much is coming out of the Rift farm belt any longer, and it’s a slow and costly business to ship produce in from other areas. After that, such basic things as stajja and ricca suddenly were being rationed, even though they were grown locally and there had been no disruptions of agriculture in the Khyntor region. The explanation this time was that surplus food stocks were being shipped to the afflicted provinces; we must all make sacrifices in such a time of dire need, et cetera, et cetera, said the imperial decree. Then came the news that certain of the plant diseases had shown up around Khyntor also, and east of Khyntor as far downriver as Ni-moya. Allotments of thuyol and ricca and stajja were cut in half, lusavender disappeared entirely from sale, meat began to become scarce. There was talk of bringing in supplies from Alhanroel and Suvrael, where apparently everything was still normal. But that was only talk, Millilain knew. There weren’t enough cargo ships in the whole world to carry produce from the other continents in quantities big enough to make a difference, and even if there were, the cost would be prohibitive. “We’re all going to starve,” she told Kristofon.
So the Shortage reached Khyntor at last.
The Shortage. The famine.
Kristofon didn’t think anyone would really starve. He was always optimistic. Somehow things will get better, he said. Somehow. But here were a hundred people desperately converging on a sausage vendor.
The Hjort woman tried to pass her. Millilain hit her hard with her shoulder and knocked her sprawling. She had never hit anyone before. She felt a strange lightheaded sensation, and a tightness in her throat. The Hjort screamed curses at her, but Millilain ran on, heart pounding, eyes aching. She jostled someone else aside and elbowed her way into the line that was forming. Up ahead, the Liiman was handing out sausages in that strange impassive Liiman way, not at all bothered, it seemed, by the struggling mob in front of him.
Tensely Millilain watched the queue moving forward. Seven or eight in front of her—would there be enough sausages for her? It was hard to see what was going on up there, whether new skewers were going on the fire as the old ones were sold. Would there be any left for her? She felt like a greedy child worrying if there were enough party favors to go around. I am being very crazy, she told herself. Why should a sausage matter so much? But she knew the answer. She had had no meat at all for three days, unless the five strips of dried salted sea-dragon flesh she had found on Starday while prowling in her cupboard qualified as meat, and she doubted that. The aroma of those sizzling sausages was powerfully attractive. To be able to purchase them was suddenly the most important thing in the world for her, perhaps the only thing in the world.
She reached the head of the line. “Two skewers,” she said.
“One to a customer.”
“Give me one, then!”
The Liiman nodded. His three intense, glowing eyes regarded her with minimal interest. “Five crowns,” the Liiman said.
Millilain gasped. Five crowns was half a day’s pay for her. Before the Shortage, she remembered, sausages had been ten weights the skewer. But that had been before the Shortage, after all.
“You aren’t serious,” she said. “You can’t charge fifty times the old price. Even in times like these.”
Someone behind her yelled, “Pay up or move out, lady!”
The Liiman said calmly, “Five crowns today. Next week, eight crowns. Week after that, a royal. Week after that, five royals. Next month, no sausages any price. You want sausages? Yes? No?”
“Yes,” Millilain muttered. Her hands were trembling as she gave him the five crowns. Another crown bought her a mug of beer, flat and stale. Feeling drained and stunned, she drifted away from the line.
Five crowns! That was what she might have expected to pay for a complete meal in a fine restaurant, not very long ago. But most of the restaurants were closed now, and the ones that remained, so she had heard, had waiting lists weeks long for tables. And the Divine only knew what
kind of prices they were charging now. But this was insane. A skewer of sausages, five crowns! Guilt assailed her. What would she tell Kristofon? The truth, she decided. I couldn’t resist, she’d say. It was an impulse, a crazy impulse. I smelled them cooking on the grill, and I couldn’t resist.
What if the Liiman had demanded eight crowns, though, or a royal? Five royals? She couldn’t answer that. She suspected that she would have paid whatever she had to, so strong had the obsession been.
She bit into the sausage as though she feared someone would snatch it from her hand. It was astonishingly good: juicy, spicy. She found herself wondering what sort of meat had gone into it. Best not to consider that, she told herself. Kristofon might not be the only one who had had the idea of hunting for little animals in the park.
She took a sip of the beer and began to raise the skewer to her mouth again.
“Millilain?”
She looked up in surprise. “Kristofon!”
“I was hoping I’d find you here. I closed the shop and came out to see what that mob was all about.”
“A sausage vendor appeared suddenly. As though a wizard had conjured him up.”
“Ah. Yes, I see.”
He was staring at the half-eaten sausage in her hand.
Millilain forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Kris. Do you want a bite?”
“Just a bite,” he said. “I suppose it won’t do to get back on the line.”
“I think they’ll all be sold in a little while.” She handed him the skewer, working hard at concealing her reluctance, and watched tensely as he nibbled an inch or two of the sausage. She felt intense relief, and more than a little shame, as he gave the rest back to her.