Carabella cried out in terror.
Her eyes opened, but she saw nothing—the sign of a sending. A shudder went rippling the length of her body. She trembled and turned to him, still asleep, still dreaming, and he held her while she whimpered and moaned, giving her dream-service, dream-comfort, protecting her against the darkness of the spirit by the strength of his arms, and at last the fury of her dream ran its course and she relaxed, limp, sweat-soaked, against his chest.
She lay still for some moments, until Valentine thought she had fallen peacefully asleep. No. She was awake, but motionless, as if contemplating her dream, confronting it, trying to carry it upward into the realm of wakefulness. Suddenly she sat upright and gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. Her eyes were wild and glassy.
“My lord!” she whispered. She backed away from him, scuttling across the bed in a strange crablike crawl, holding one arm folded above her breasts and the other as a kind of shield across her face. Her lips were quivering. Valentine reached for her, but she pulled away in horror and threw herself to the rough wooden floor, where she crouched in an eerie huddle, folded inward on herself as if trying to conceal her nakedness.
“Carabella?” he said, bewildered.
She looked up at him. “Lord—lord—please—let me be, lord—”
And bowed again, and made the starburst with her fingers, the two-handed gesture of obeisance that one makes only when one comes before the Coronal.
15
Wondering whether it might be he and not she who had been dreaming, and the dream still going on, Valentine rose, found a robe for Carabella to wear, put on one of his own garments. Still she crouched apart from him, stunned and shattered. When he tried to comfort her, she pulled away, huddling still deeper into herself.
“What is it?” he asked. “What happened, Carabella?”
“I dreamed—I dreamed that you were—” She faltered. “So real, so terrible—”
“Tell me. I’ll speak your dream for you, if I can.”
“It needs no speaking. It speaks for itself.” She made the starburst sign at him again. In a cold, low, inflectionless voice she said, “I dreamed that you were the true Coronal Lord Valentine, that you had been robbed of your power and all your memory, and set into another’s body, and turned loose near Pidruid to roam and live an idle life while someone else ruled in your stead.”
Valentine felt himself at the edge of a great abyss, and the ground crumbling beneath his feet.
“Was this a sending?” he asked.
“It was a sending. I know not from whom, Lady or King, but it was no dream of mine; it was something that was placed in my mind from outside. I saw you, lord—”
“Stop calling me that.”
“—atop Castle Mount, and your face was the face of the other Lord Valentine, the dark-haired one we juggled for, and then you came down from the Mount to travel on the grand processional in all the lands, and while you were in the south, in my own city of Til-omon it was, they gave you a drug and seized you in your sleep and changed you into this body and cast you out. No one was the wiser that you had been magicked out of your royal powers. And I have touched you, lord, and shared your bed, and been familiar with you in a thousand ways, and how will I be forgiven, lord?”
“Carabella?”
She cowered and trembled.
“Look up, Carabella. Look at me.”
She shook her head. He knelt before her, and touched his hand to her chin. She shuddered as though he had marked her with acid. Her muscles were rigid. He touched her again.
“Raise your head,” he said gently. “Look at me.”
She looked up, slowly, timidly, the way one might look into the face of the sun, fearing the brightness.
He said, “I am Valentine the juggler and nothing more.”
“No, lord.”
“The Coronal is a dark-haired man, and my hair is golden.”
“I beg you, lord, let me be. You frighten me.”
“A wandering juggler frightens you?”
“It is not who you are that frightens me. The person you are is a friend I have come to love. It is who you have been, lord. You have stood beside the Pontifex and tasted the royal wine. You have walked in the highest rooms of Castle Mount. You have known the fullest power of the world. It was a true dream, lord, it was as clear and real as anything I have ever seen, a sending beyond doubt, not to be questioned. And you are rightful Coronal, and I have touched your body and you have touched mine, and it is sacrilege a thousand times over for an ordinary woman like me to approach a Coronal so closely. And I will die for it.”
Valentine smiled. “If I was ever Coronal, love, it was in another body, and there’s nothing holy about the one you embraced tonight. But I was never Coronal.”
Her gaze rested squarely on him. Her tone was less quavering as she said, “You remember nothing of your life before Pidruid. You were unable to tell me your father’s name, and you told me of your childhood in Ni-moya and didn’t believe it yourself, and you guessed at a name for your mother. Is this not true?”
Valentine nodded.
“And Shanamir has told me you had much money in your purse, but had no idea what any of it was worth, and tried to pay a sausage-man with a fifty-royal piece. True?”
He nodded again.
“As though you had lived all your life at court, perhaps, and never handled money? You know so little, Valentine! You have to be taught—like a child.”
“Something has happened to my memory, yes. But does that make me Coronal?”
“The way you juggle, so naturally, as though all skills are yours if you want them—the way you move, the way you hold yourself, the radiance that comes from you, the sense you give everyone that you were born to hold power—”
“Do I give that?”
“We have talked of little else, since you came among us. That you must be a fallen prince, some exiled duke perhaps. But then my dream—it leaves no doubt, lord—”
Her face was white with strain. For a moment she had overcome her awe, but only for a moment, and now she trembled again. And the awe was contagious, it seemed, for Valentine himself began to feel fear, a coldness of the skin. Was there truth in any of this? Was he an anointed Coronal that had touched hands with Tyeveras in the heart of the Labyrinth and at the summit of Castle Mount?
He heard the voice of the dream-speaker Tisana. You have fallen from a high place, and now you must begin to climb back to it, she had said. Impossible. Unthinkable. Nevertheless, Lord Valentine, that ascent awaits you, and it is not I who lays it on you. Unreal. Impossible. And yet his dreams, that brother who would have slain him, and whom he had slain instead, and those Coronals and Pontifexes moving through the chambers of his soul, and all the rest. Could it be? Impossible. Impossible.
He said, “You mustn’t fear me, Carabella.”
She shivered. He reached for her and she shied away, crying, “No! Don’t touch me! My lord—”
Tenderly he said, “Even if I was once Coronal—and how strange and foolish that sounds to me—even if, Carabella, I am Coronal no longer, I am not in any anointed body, and what has taken place between us is no sacrilege. I am Valentine the juggler now, whoever I may have been in a former life.”
“You don’t understand, lord.”
“I understand that a Coronal is a man like any other, only he bears more responsibilities than others, but there is nothing magical about him and nothing to fear except his power, and I have none of that. If ever I had.”
“No,” she said. “A Coronal is touched by the highest grace, and it never goes from him.”
“Anyone can be Coronal, given the right training and the right cast of mind. One isn’t bred for it. Coronals have come from every district of Majipoor, every level of society.”
“Lord, you don’t understand. To have been Coronal is to be touched by grace. You have ruled, you have walked on Castle Mount, you have been adopted into the line of Lord Stiamot and Lord Dekkeret an
d Lord Prestimion, you are brother to Lord Voriax, you are the son of the Lady of the Isle. And I am to think of you as an ordinary man? I am to have no fear of you?”
He stared at her in shock.
He remembered what had gone through his own mind when he stood in the streets and beheld Lord Valentine the Coronal in the procession, and had felt himself in the presence of grace and might, and had realized that to be Coronal was to become a being set apart, a personage of aura and strangeness, one who holds power over twenty billions, who carries in himself the energies of thousands of years of famed princes, who is destined to go on to the Labyrinth one day and wear the authority of the Pontifex. Incomprehensible as all this was to him, it was sinking in, and he was dumbfounded and overwhelmed by it. But it was absurd. To fear himself? To sink down in awe at his own imaginary majesty? He was Valentine the juggler, and nothing more!
Carabella was sobbing. In another moment she would be hysterical. The Vroon, surely, would have some sleeping potion that would give her ease.
“Wait,” Valentine said. “I’ll be back in a moment. I’ll ask Deliamber for something to calm you.”
He darted from the room, down the hall, wondering which room was the sorcerer’s. All doors were closed. He debated knocking at random, hoping not to blunder in on Zalzan Kavol, when a dry voice said out of the darkness from a point somewhere below his elbow, “Do you have trouble sleeping?”
“Deliamber?”
“Here. Close by you.”
Valentine peered, narrowing his eyes, and made out the Vroon sitting cross-tentacled in the hallway in some kind of posture of meditation. Deliamber rose.
“I thought you might come in search of me soon,” he said.
“Carabella has had a sending. She needs a drug to quiet her spirit. Do you have anything useful?”
“No drugs, no. A touch, though—it can be done. Come.” The little Vroon glided along the corridor and into the room that Valentine shared with Carabella. She had not moved, still huddled pitifully beside the bed with her robe wrapped carelessly about her. Deliamber went to her at once; his ropy tendrils delicately enfolded her shoulders, and she loosened her tautly held muscles, and slumped as though rendered boneless. The sound of her heavy breathing was loud in the room. After a moment she looked up, calmer now, but still with a dazed, frozen look in her eyes.
She gestured toward Valentine and said, “I dreamed that he was—that he had been—” She hesitated.
“I know,” said Deliamber.
“It is not true,” Valentine said thickly. “I am only a juggler.”
Mildly Deliamber said, “You are only a juggler now.”
“You believe this nonsense too?”
“It was obvious from the first. When you stepped between the Skandar and me. This is the act of a king, I told myself, and I read your soul—”
“What?”
“A professional trick. I read your soul, and saw what had been done to you—”
“But such a thing is impossible!” Valentine protested. “To take a man’s mind from his body, and put it in another’s, and put another’s mind in his—”
“Impossible? No,” Deliamber said. “I think not. There have been tales coming out of Suvrael that studies into this art are being done at the court of the King of Dreams. For several years now the rumors of strange experiments have trickled forth.”
Valentine stared sullenly at his fingertips. “It could not be done.”
“So I thought, too, when first I heard it. But then I considered. There are many wizardries nearly as great whose secrets I myself know, and I am only a minor wizard. The seeds of such an art have long existed. Maybe some Suvraelu sorcerer has found a way to germinate those seeds at last. Valentine, if I were you I would not reject the possibility.”
“A change of bodies?” Valentine said, bewildered. “This is not my true body? Whose would it be, then?”
“Who knows? Some unlucky man struck down by accident, drowned perhaps, or choked on a piece of meat, or the victim of some evil toadstool unwisely eaten. Dead, anyway, in some manner that left his body reasonably whole; and taken with the hour of death to some secret place, there to have the Coronal’s soul transplanted into the empty shell, and then another man, giving up his own body forever, quickly taking possession of the Coronal’s vacated skull, possibly retaining much of the Coronal’s own memory and mind in union with his own, so that he can carry on the masquerade of ruling as though he were the true monarch—”
“I accept none of this as remotely real,” said Valentine stubbornly.
“Nevertheless,” Deliamber said, “when I looked into your soul I saw everything even as I describe it to you now. And felt more than a little fear—in my trade one doesn’t often meet Coronals, or stumble on such evidence of gross treason—and I took a moment to compose myself, and asked myself if I would not be wiser to forget what I had seen, and for a time I seriously considered it. But then I knew that I could not, that I would be whipped with monstrous dreams until the end of my days if I ignored what I knew. I told myself that there is much in the world that is in need of repair, and I would, Divine willing, be part of the fixing. And now the fixing has begun.”
Valentine said, “There is nothing to it.”
“For the sake of argument, say that there is,” Deliamber urged. “Pretend that they came upon you in Til-omon and cast you from your body and put a usurper upon the throne. Suppose that is the case. What would you do then?”
“Nothing at all.”
“No?”
“Nothing,” said Valentine forcefully. “Let him be Coronal who wants to be Coronal. I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen. If I once dwelled on Castle Mount, so be it, but I am not there now, and nothing in my being impels me to go back there. I’m a juggler and a good one getting better, and a happy man. Is the Coronal happy? Is the Pontifex? If I have been cast out of power, I regard it as good fortune. I would not now resume the burden.”
“It is what you were destined to carry.”
“Destined? Destined?” Valentine laughed. “Just as fair to say that I was destined to be Coronal a little while, and then to be displaced by someone more fitting. One must be crazy to be a ruler, Deliamber, and I’m sane. The government is a burden and a chore. I would not accept it.”
“You will,” Deliamber said. “You’ve been tampered with and you are not yourself. But once a Coronal, forever a Coronal. You will be healed and come into your own again, Lord Valentine.”
“Don’t use that title!”
“It will be yours again,” said Deliamber.
Valentine angrily shook the suggestion away. He looked toward Carabella: she was asleep on the floor, head against the bed. Carefully he lifted her and put her under the coverlet. To Deliamber he said, “It grows late, and there’s been much foolishness tonight. My head hurts from all this heavy talk. Do to me what you did to her, wizard, and grant me sleep, and say no more to me of responsibilities that have never been mine and are never going to be mine. We must perform tomorrow, and I want to be rested for it.”
“Very well. Get into bed.”
Valentine settled in beside Carabella. The Vroon touched him lightly, then with more force, and Valentine felt his mind growing cloudy. Sleep came upon him easily, like a thick white mist sweeping up out of the ocean at twilight. Good. Good. Willingly he relinquished consciousness.
And in the night he dreamed, and there was about the dream a bright fierce glow that had the unmistakable aspect of a sending, for it was a dream vivid beyond imagining.
He saw himself crossing the harsh and terrible purple plain that he had visited so often in recent slumber. This time he knew without question where the plain was: no realm of fantasy, but the distant continent of Suvrael that lay beneath the unshielded glare of the naked sun, and these fissures in the ground were scars of summer, where what little moisture the soil contained had been sucked forth. Ugly twisted plants with swollen grayish leaves lay limp agains
t the ground, and things with thorns and weird angular joints grew tall. Valentine walked swiftly, in the heat and the merciless biting wind and the skin-cracking dryness. He was late, overdue at the palace of the King of Dreams, where he had been hired to perform.
The palace now loomed before him, sinister, black-shadowed, all spidery turrets and jagged porticoes, a building as spiky and forbidding as the plants of the desert. More a jail than a palace it seemed, at least in its outer aspect, but inside everything was different, cool and luxurious, with fountains in the courtyards, and soft plush draperies, and a scent of flowers in the air. Servants bowed and beckoned to him, leading him to inner chambers, stripping away his sand-crusted clothes, bathing him, drying him in feathery towels, giving him fresh clothes, elegant jeweled robes, offering him chilled sherbets, icy wine of a silvery hue, morsels of unknown delicate meats, and at last bringing him to the great high-vaulted throne-room where the King of Dreams sat in state.
At a vast distance Valentine saw him enthroned: Simonan Barjazid, the malign and unpredictable Power who from this windswept desert territory sent his messages of terrible import all through Majipoor. He was a heavy-bodied man, his face beardless, fleshy-jowled, eyes deep-set and ringed with dark circles, and around his close-cropped stubbly head he wore the golden diadem of his power, the thought-amplifying apparatus that a Barjazid had devised a thousand years ago. To Simonan’s left sat his son Cristoph, fleshy like his father, and at his right hand was his son Minax, the heir, a man of lean and forbidding aspect, dark-skinned and sharp-faced, as if honed by the desert winds.
The King of Dreams, with a casual wave of his hand, ordered Valentine to begin.
It was knives he juggled, ten, fifteen of them, thin shining stilettos that would pierce right through his arm if they dropped wrongly, but he handled them with ease, juggling as only Sleet might do, or perhaps Zalzan Kavol, a virtuoso display of skill. Valentine stood still, making only the tiniest flicking motions of his hands and wrists, and the knives soared aloft and flashed with keen brilliance, coursing high through the air and falling perfectly back to his waiting fingers, and as they rose and fell, rose and fell, the arc that they described took on an alteration of form, no longer a mere cascade but becoming the starburst emblem of the Coronal, blades pointing outward as they flew through the air, and abruptly, as Valentine approached the climax of his performance, the knives froze in midair, and hovered there just above his questing fingers, and would not descend to them.