Lord Valentine's Castle

  The Stoienzar Peninsula, long and narrow, jutted like a colossal thumb out of the central mass of Alhanroel. On its southern, or ocean, side, it was intolerably hot. There were few settlements on that jungled insect-ridden coast. Most of the peninsula’s considerable population was clustered along the Gulf coast, which had a major city every hundred miles or so and a virtually unbroken line of fishing villages and farming districts and resort towns between. It was early summer now, and a heavy haze of heat lay over the tepid, virtually motionless waters of the Gulf. The fleet paused a day for further provisioning at Kircidane, where the coast began its sweeping northward curve, and then began the crossing to Treymone.

  Valentine spent many of the quiet seaward hours alone in his cabin, practicing the use of the circlet the Lady had given him. In a week he mastered the art of entering a light dozing trance—he could slide his mind instantly below the threshold of sleep now, and just as readily emerge from it, all the while staying aware of ongoing events. In the trance-state he was able, although spottily and without much force, to make contact with other minds, to wander out aboard ship and locate the aura of a sleeping soul, sleepers being far more vulnerable to such intrusions than those who were awake. He could lightly touch Carabella’s mind, or Sleet’s, or Shanamir’s, and transmit his own image, or some genial message of goodwill. Reaching a less familiar mind—that of Pandelon the carpenter, say, or the hierarch Lorivade—was still too hard for him except in the briefest, most fragmentary bursts, and he had no success at all entering minds of non-human origin, even ones so well known to him as those of Zalzan Kavol or Khun or Deliamber. But he was still learning. He felt his skills growing day by day, as they had when he first had taken up juggling; and this was juggling of a sort, for to use the circlet he had to occupy a position at the very center of his soul, undistracted by irrelevant thought, and coordinate all aspects of his being toward the single thrust of making contact. By the time the Lady Thiin was in view of Treymone, Valentine had advanced to the level where he could plant the beginnings of dreams, with events and incidents and images, in the minds of his subjects. To Shanamir he sent a dream of Falkynkip, and mounts grazing in a field, and a great gihorna-bird circling overhead, descending in a foolish flapping of mighty wings. At table the next morning the boy described the dream in all details, except only that the bird was a milufta, a carrion-feeder, with bright orange beak and ugly blue claws. “What does it mean, that I would dream of miluftas swooping down?” Shanamir asked, and Valentine said, “Could it be that you misremember the dream, and it was another bird you saw, a gihorna, perhaps, a bird of good omen?” But Shanamir, in that straightforward and innocent way of his, merely shook his head and said, “If I can’t tell a gihorna from a milufta, my lord, even in my sleep, I ought to be back in Falkynkip cleaning out the stables.” Valentine looked away, hiding a smile, and resolved to work more diligently on his image-sending technique.

  To Carabella he sent a dream of juggling crystal goblets filled with golden wine, and she reported it accurately, down to the tapered shape of the goblets. To Sleet he sent a dream of Lord Valentine’s garden, a wonderland of glistening feathery-leaved white bushes and solemn, spherical prickly things on long stems and little three-forked plants with winking playful eyes at their tips, all of them imaginary and not a mouthplant among them, and Sleet described that imaginary garden in delight, saying that if only the Coronal would plant a garden like that on Castle Mount he would be well pleased to stroll in it.

  Dreams came to him as well. Almost nightly the Lady his mother touched his soul from afar. Her serene presence passed through his sleeping spirit like a cool shaft of moonlight, calming and reassuring him. He dreamed, too, of old times on Castle Mount, memories of his early days upwelling, tournaments and races and games, his friends Tunigorn and Elidath and Stasilaine by his side, and his brother Voriax teaching him to use sword and bow, and Lord Malibor the Coronal traveling from city to city on the Mount like some grand and shining demigod, and much more of the same, a flood of images released from the depths of his mind.

  Not all the dreams were agreeable. The night before the Lady Thiin reached the mainland he saw himself going ashore, landing on some forlorn, windswept beach of low and twisted scrub that had a dull, weary look in the late afternoon light. And he began to walk inland toward Castle Mount, rising in the distance, a jagged and sharp-tipped spire. But there was a wall in his way, a wall higher than the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, and that wall was a band of iron, more metal than existed on all of Majipoor, a dark and terrible iron girdle that seemed to span the world from pole to pole, and he was on one side of it and Castle Mount on the other. As he drew near he perceived that the wall crackled as if with electricity, and a low humming sound came from it, and when he looked closely at it he saw his reflection in the shining metal, and the face that peered back at him out of that frightful iron band was the face of the son of the King of Dreams.

  3

  Treymone was the city of the celebrated tree-houses, famed throughout Majipoor. His second day ashore, Valentine went to visit them, in the coastal district just south of the mouth of the River Trey.

  Nowhere else but in the Trey’s alluvial plain did the tree-houses live. They had short stout trunks a little like those of dwikkas, though not nearly so thick, and their bark was a handsome pale green, with a high gloss to it. From these barrel-like boles rose sturdy flattened branches that curved upward and outward like the fingers of two hands pressed together at the heels, and viny twigs wandered from branch to branch, adhering in many places, creating a snug cup-shaped enclosure.

  The tree-folk of Treymone shaped their dwellings to suit their whims by pulling the pliant branches into the forms of rooms and corridors and fastening them into place until the natural adhesion of bark to bark made the join permanent. From the trees came leaves tender and sweet for salads, fragrant cream-colored flowers whose pollen was a mild euphoric, tart bluish fruits that had many uses, and a sweet pale sap, easily tapped, that served in place of wine. Each tree lived a thousand years or more; families maintained jealous control over them; ten thousand trees filled the plain, all mature and inhabited. Valentine saw a few skinny saplings at the edge of the district. “These,” he was told, “are newly planted, to replace some that died in recent years.”

  “Where does a family go when its tree dies?”

  “Into town,” said the guide, “to what we call houses of mourning, until the new tree is grown. That may be twenty years. We dread such a thing, but it happens only one generation out of ten.”

  “And there’s no way to grow the trees elsewhere?”

  “Not an inch beyond where you see them. Only in our climate will they thrive, and only in the soil on which you stand can they grow to fullness. Elsewhere they live a year or two, small stunted things.”

  Quietly to Carabella Valentine said, “We can make the experiment anyway. I wonder if they can spare some of their precious soil for Lord Valentine’s garden.”

  She smiled. “Even a small tree-house—a place where you can go when the cares of government grow too heavy, and sit hidden in the leaves, and breathe the perfume of the flowers, and pluck the fruits—oh, if you could have such a thing!”

  “Someday I will,” said Valentine, “And you’ll sit beside me in it.”

  Carabella gave him a startled look. “I, my lord?”

  “If not you, then who? Dominin Barjazid?” Lightly he touched her hand. “Do you think our travels together end when we reach Castle Mount?”

  “We should not talk of such things now,” she told him severely. To the guide she said in a louder tone, “And these young trees—how do you care for them? Are they watered often?”

  From Treymone it was several weeks’ journey by fast floater-car to the Labyrinth, which lay in south-central Alhanroel. The countryside here was mainly a lowland, with rich red soil in the river valley and thin, gray, sandy stuff beyond it, and settlements grew more sparse as Valentine and his party mo
ved inland. There was occasional rain, but it seemed to sink immediately into the porous soil. The weather was warm and sometimes there was an oppressive weight to the heat. Day after day slipped by in bland, monotonous driving. To Valentine this sort of travel wholly lacked the magic and mystery—now enhanced by nostalgia—of the months he had spent crossing Zimroel in Zalzan Kavol’s elegant wagon. Then, every day had seemed a venture into the unknown, with fresh challenges at each turn, and always the excitement of performing, of stopping in strange towns to put on shows. Now? Everything was done for him by adjutants and aides-de-camp. He was becoming a prince again—though a prince of very modest puissance indeed, with hardly more than a hundred followers—and he was not at all certain he cared for it.

  Late in the second week the landscape abruptly changed, turning rough and broken, with black flat-topped hills rising now from a dry, deeply ridged tableland. The only plants that grew here were small scraggly bushes, dark twisted things with tiny waxen leaves, and, on the higher slopes, thorny candelabra-like growths of moon-cactus, ghostly white, twice as tall as a man. Little long-legged animals with red fur and puffy yellow tails skittered about nervously, vanishing into holes whenever a floater came too close.

  Deliamber said, “This is the beginning of the Desert of the Labyrinth. Soon we will see the stone cities of the ancients.”

  Valentine had approached the Labyrinth from the other side, the northwest, the time he had been to it in his former life. There was desert there too, and the great haunted ruined city of Velalisier; but he had come down from Castle Mount by riverboat, bypassing all the unlucky dead lands that surrounded the Labyrinth, and the texture of this bleak and forbidding zone was new to him. He found it absorbingly strange at first, especially at sunset, when the vast cloudless sky was streaked with grotesque bands of violent color and the parched soil took on an eerie metallic look. But after a few days the starkness and austerity ceased to give him pleasure and became disturbing, unsettling, menacing. Something about this sharp desert air, perhaps, was working unfavorably on his sensibilities. He had never experienced desert before, for there was none in Zimroel and none except this interior pocket of dryness in well-watered Alhanroel. Desert conditions were something he associated with Suvrael, which he had visited often enough in dreams, all of them troublesome ones; and he could not escape the notion, irrational and bizarre, that he was riding toward a rendezvous with the King of Dreams.

  After a time Deliamber said, “There are the ruins.”

  It was difficult at first to distinguish them from the rocks of the desert. All Valentine saw were tumbled dark monoliths, scattered as though by a giant’s contemptuous hand, in little patches every mile or two. But gradually he discerned form: this was a bit of wall, this the foundation of some cyclopean palace, this perhaps an altar. Everything was built to titanic scale, although the individual groups of ruins, half covered by drifting sand, were unimpressive isolated outposts.

  Valentine called the caravan to a halt at one particularly broad strew of ruins and led an inspection party to the site. He touched the rocks cautiously, fearing he might be committing some sort of sacrilege. The stone was cool, smooth to the touch, faintly encrusted by leathery growths of yellow lichen.

  “And are these the work of the Metamorphs?” he asked.

  Deliamber shrugged. “So we think, but no one knows.”

  “I have heard it said,” remarked Admiral Asenhart, “that the first human settlers built these cities soon after the Landing-time, and that they were overthrown in the civil wars before the Pontifex Dvorn established government.”

  “Of course, few records survive of those days,” said Deliamber.

  Asenhart squinted at the Vroon. “Are you of a contrary opinion, then?”

  “I? I? I hold no opinion at all of events of fourteen thousand years ago. I am not as old as you suspect, Admiral.”

  The hierarch Lorivade said in a dry deep tone, “It seems unlikely to me that the early settlers would build so far from the sea. Or that they would trouble themselves to haul such huge blocks of stone about.”

  “Then you too think these were Metamorph cities?” said Valentine.

  “The Metamorphs are wild savages who live in the jungles and dance to bring rain,” Asenhart said.

  Lorivade, looking bothered at the admiral’s interruption, said with testy precision, “I think it altogether likely.” To Asenhart she added, “Not savages, Admiral, but refugees. They may well have fallen from a higher estate.”

  “Pushed, rather,” said Carabella.

  Valentine said, “The government should organize studies of these ruins, if it hasn’t already been done. We need to know more about pre-human civilizations on Majipoor, and if these are Metamorph places, we might consider giving them a kind of custodianship of them. We—”

  “The ruins need no custodians other than the ones they already have,” said a new voice suddenly.

  Valentine turned, startled. A bizarre figure had emerged from behind a monolith—a gaunt, almost fleshless man of sixty or seventy, with fierce blazing eyes set in jutting bony rims and a thin, wide, virtually toothless mouth now curved in a mocking grin. He was armed with a long narrow sword and was clad in a strange garment made entirely from the red fur of the desert-animals. Atop his head was a cap of thick yellow tail-fur, which he swept off in a grand gesture as he made a deep, sweeping bow. When he straightened, his hand rested on the pommel of his sword.

  Valentine said courteously, “And are we in the presence of one of those custodians?”

  “More than one,” the other replied. And from the rocks there quietly came eight or ten similar fantasticos, as angular and bony as the first, and like the first all clad in scruffy fur leggings and jackets and wearing absurd furry caps. All carried swords, and all seemed ready to use them. A second group appeared behind them, materializing as though out of the air, and then a third, a good-sized troop, thirty or forty in all.

  There were eleven in Valentine’s party, mostly unarmed. The others were back in the floater-cars, two hundred yards away on the main highway. While they had stood here debating nice points of ancient history, they had allowed themselves to be surrounded.

  The leader said, “By what right do you trespass here?”

  Valentine heard a faint clearing of the throat from Lisamon Hultin. He saw a stiffening also of Asenhart’s posture. But Valentine signaled them to be calm.

  He said, “May I know who it is that addresses me?”

  “I am Duke Nascimonte of Vornek Crag, Overlord of the Western Marches. About me you see the chief nobles of my realm, who serve me loyally in all things.”

  Valentine had no recollection of a province known as the Western Marches, nor of any such duke. Possibly he had forgotten some of his geography when his mind was meddled with, but not, he suspected, quite so much. Yet he did not choose to trifle with Duke Nascimonte.

  Solemnly he said, “We meant no trespass, your grace, in passing through your domain. We are travelers bound for the Labyrinth on business with the Pontifex, and this seemed the most direct route between Treymone and there.”

  “So it is. You would have done better to approach the Pontifex by a less direct route.”

  Lisamon Hultin roared suddenly, “Give us no trouble! Have you any idea who this man is?”

  Annoyed, Valentine snapped his fingers at the giantess to silence her.

  Nascimonte said blandly, “Not in the least. But he could be Lord Valentine himself and he would not pass here lightly. Lord Valentine less than any other, in fact.”

  “Have you some special quarrel with Lord Valentine, then?” Valentine asked.

  The bandit laughed harshly. “The Coronal is my most hated enemy.”

  “Why, then, your hand must be set against all of civilization, for everyone owes allegiance to the Coronal and must for order’s sake oppose his enemies. Can you truly be a duke, and not accept the Coronal’s authority?”

  “Not this Coronal’s,” Nascimonte r
eplied. He sauntered coolly across the open space that separated him from Valentine, hand still resting on his sword, and peered closely at him. “You wear fine clothes. You smell of city comforts. You must be rich, and live in a great house somewhere high up on the Mount, and have servants to meet your every need. What would you say, if one day all that were stripped from you, eh? If by the whim of another you were cast down into poverty?”

  “I have had that experience,” said Valentine evenly.

  “Have you, now? You, traveling in that cavalcade of floater-cars, with your retinue about you? Who are you, anyway?”

  “Lord Valentine the Coronal,” Valentine answered without hesitation.

  Nascimonte’s fiery eyes flared with rage. For an instant it appeared as if he would draw his sword; then, as if seeing a jest much to his own ferocious humor, he relaxed and said, “Yes, you are Coronal the way I am a duke. Well, Lord Valentine, your kindness will repay me for my earlier losses. The fee for crossing the zone of ruins today is one thousand royals.”

  “We have no such sum,” Valentine said mildly.

  “Then you’ll make camp with us until your lackeys fetch it.” He gestured to his men. “Seize them and bind them. Turn one loose—this one, the Vroon—to be the messenger.” To Deliamber he said, “Vroon, carry word to those in the floaters that we hold these folk here for payment of a thousand royals, to be delivered within a month. And if you return with militia instead of money, why, bear in mind that we know these hills, and the officers of the law do not. You’ll never see any of your people alive again.”

  “Wait,” Valentine said, as Nascimonte’s men stepped forward. “Tell me your quarrel with the Coronal.”

  Nascimonte scowled. “He came through this part of Alhanroel last year, returning from Zimroel where he made the grand processional. I lived then in the foothills of Mount Ebersinul, looking out on Lake Ivory, and I raised ricca and thuyol and milaile, and my plantation was the finest in the province, for my family has spent sixteen generations cultivating it. The Coronal and his party were billeted on me, as best able to meet the needs of hospitality for him, and at the height of thuyol-harvest he came to me with all his hundreds of hangers-on and lackeys, his myriad courtiers, enough mounts to graze half a continent bare, and between one Starday and the next they drank my cellars dry, they made festival in the fields and spoiled the crops, they torched the manor-house in drunken play, they shattered the dam and drowned my fields, they ruined me entirely for their own sport, and then they marched away, not even knowing what they had done to me, or caring. The moneylenders have it all now, and I live in the rocks of Vornek Crag courtesy of Lord Valentine and his friends, and where is justice? It will cost you a thousand royals to leave these ancient ruins, stranger, and though I hold you no malice I will slit your throat as coolly as Lord Valentine’s men opened my dam, and with as little concern, if the money fails to come.” He turned away and said again, “Bind them.”