Lord Valentine's Castle: Book One of the Majipoor Cycle

  Compassion flooded Valentine’s spirit. In silence he held the smaller man for a moment, as if with the strength of his arms alone he could eradicate the memory of the horrific nightmare that had maimed his soul. When he released him Valentine said slowly, “Such a dream is truly terrible. But we are taught to use our dreams, not to let ourselves be crushed by them.”

  “This one is beyond my using, friend. Except to warn me to stay clear of Metamorphs.”

  “You take it too straightforwardly. What if something more oblique was intended? Did you have the dream spoken, Sleet?”

  “It seemed unnecessary.”

  “It was you who urged me to see a speaker, when I dreamed strangely in Pidruid! I remember your very words. The King never sends simple messages, you said.”

  Sleet offered an ironic smile. “We are always better doctors for others than for ourselves, Valentine. In any event, it’s too late to have a fifteen-year-old dream spoken, and I am its prisoner now.”

  “Free yourself!”

  “How?”

  “When a child has a dream that he is falling, and awakens in fright, what does his parent say? That falling dreams are not to be taken seriously, because one doesn’t really get hurt in dreams? Or that the child should be thankful for a falling dream, because such a dream is a good dream, that it speaks of power and strength, that the child was not falling but flying, to a place where he would have learned something, if he had not allowed anxiety and fear to shake him loose of the dreamworld?”

  “That the child should be thankful for the dream,” said Sleet.

  “Indeed. And so too with all other ‘bad’ dreams: we must not be frightened, they tell us, but be grateful for the wisdom of dreams, and act on it.”

  “So children are told, yes. Even so, adults don’t always handle such dreams better than children. I recall some cries and whimpers coming from you in your sleep of late, Valentine.”

  “I try to learn from my dreams, however dark they may be.”

  “What do you want from me, Valentine?”

  “That you come with us to Ilirivoyne.”

  “Why is that so important to you?”

  Valentine said, “You belong to this troupe. We are a whole with you and broken without you.”

  “The Skandars are masterly jugglers. It hardly matters what the human performers contribute. Carabella and I are with the troupe for the same reason as you, to comply with a stupid law. You’ll earn your pay whether I’m with you or not.”

  “I learn the art from you, though.”

  “You can learn from Carabella. She’s as skilled as I am, and is your lover besides, who knows you better than I ever could. And the Divine spare you,” said Sleet in a suddenly terrifying voice, “from losing her to the Shapeshifters in Ilirivoyne!”

  “It isn’t something I fear,” said Valentine. He extended his hands toward Sleet. “I would have you remain with us.”

  “Why?”

  “I value you.”

  “And I value you, Valentine. But it would give me great pain to go where Zalzan Kavol would have us go. Why is it so urgent for you to insist on my enduring that pain?”

  “You might be healed of that pain,” said Valentine, “if you go to Ilirivoyne and find that the Metamorphs are only harmless primitives.”

  “I can live with my pain,” Sleet replied. “The price of that healing seems too high.”

  “We can live with the most horrible wounds. But why not attempt to cure them?”

  “There is some other thing not being spoken here, Valentine.”

  Valentine paused and let his breath out slowly. “Yes,” he said.

  “What is it, then?”

  With some hesitation Valentine said, “Sleet, have I figured in your dreams at all, since we met in Pidruid?”

  “You have, yes.”

  “In what way?”

  “How does this matter?”

  “Have you dreamed,” said Valentine, “that I might be somewhat unusual in Majipoor, someone of more distinction and power than I myself comprehend?”

  “Your bearing and poise told me that at our first meeting. And the phenomenal skill with which you learned our art. And the content of your own dreams that you’ve shared with me.”

  “And who am I, in those dreams. Sleet?”

  “A person of might and grace, fallen through deceit from his high position. A duke, maybe. A prince of the realm.”

  “Or higher?”

  Sleet licked his lips. “Higher, yes. Perhaps. What do you want with me, Valentine?”

  “To accompany me to Ilirivoyne and beyond.”

  “Do you tell me that there’s truth in what I’ve dreamed?”

  “This I’m yet to learn,” said Valentine. “But I think there’s truth in it, yes. I feel more and more strongly that there must be truth in it. Sendings tell me there’s truth in it.”

  “My lord—” Sleet whispered.

  “Perhaps.”

  Sleet looked at him in amazement and began to fall to his knees. Valentine caught him hastily and held him upright. “None of that,” he said. “The others can see. I want nobody to have an inkling of this. Besides, there remain great areas of doubt. I would not have you kneeling to me, Sleet, or making starbursts with your fingers, or any of that, while I am still uncertain of the truth.”

  “My lord—”

  “I remain Valentine the juggler.”

  “I am frightened now, my lord. I came within a minute of a foul death today, and this frightens me more, to stand here quietly talking with you about these things.”

  “Call me Valentine.”

  “How can I?” Sleet asked.

  “You called me Valentine five minutes ago.”

  “That was before.”

  “Nothing has changed, Sleet.”

  Sleet shook the idea away. “Everything has changed, my lord.”

  Valentine sighed heavily. He felt like an imposter, like a fraud, manipulating Sleet in this way, and yet there seemed purpose to it, and genuine need. “If everything has changed, then will you follow me as I command? Even to Ilirivoyne?”

  “If I must,” said Sleet, dazed.

  “No harm of the kind you fear will come to you among the Metamorphs. You’ll emerge from their country healed of the pain that has racked you. You do believe that, don’t you, Sleet?”

  “It frightens me to go there.”

  “I need you by me in what lies ahead,” said Valentine. “And through no choice of mine, Ilirivoyne has become part of my journey. I ask you to follow me there.”

  Sleet bowed his head. “If I must, my lord.”

  “And I ask you, by the same compulsion, to call me Valentine and show me no more respect in front of the others than you would have shown me yesterday.”

  “As you wish,” Sleet said.

  “Valentine.”

  “Valentine,” said Sleet reluctantly. “As you wish—Valentine.”

  “Come, then.”

  He led Sleet back to the group. Zalzan Kavol was, as usual, pacing impatiently; the others were preparing the wagon for departure. To the Skandar Valentine said, “I’ve talked Sleet into withdrawing his resignation. He’ll accompany us to Ilirivoyne.”

  Zalzan Kavol looked altogether dumbfounded. “How did you manage to do that?”

  “Yes,” said Vinorkis. “What did you say to him, anyway?”

  With a cheerful smile Valentine said, “It would be tedious to explain, I think.”

  8

  The pace of the journey now accelerated. All day long the wagon purred along the highway, and sometimes well into the evening. Lisamon Hultin rode alongside, though her mount, sturdy as it was, needed more rest than those that drew the wagon, and occasionally she fell behind, catching up as opportunity allowed: carrying her heroic bulk was no easy task for any animal.

  On they went through a tamed province of city after city, broken only by modest belts of greenery that barely obeyed the letter of the density laws. This province of Maza
done was a place where commercial pursuits kept many millions employed, for Mazadone was the gateway to all the territories of northwestern Zimroel for goods coming from the east, and the chief transshipment point for overland conveyance of merchandise of Pidruid and Til-omon heading eastward. They passed quickly in and out of a host of interchangeable and forgettable cities, Cynthion and Apoortel and Doirectine, Mazadone city itself, Borgax and Thagobar beyond it, all of them subdued and quiescent during the mourning period for the late duke, and strips of yellow dangling everywhere as sign of sorrow. It seemed to Valentine a heavy thing to shut down an entire province for the death of a duke. What would these people do, he wondered, over the death of a Pontifex? How had they responded to the premature passing of the Coronal Lord Voriax two years ago? But perhaps they took the going of their local duke more seriously, he thought, for he was a visible figure, real and present among them, whereas to people of Zimroel, thousands of miles separated from Castle Mount or Labyrinth, the Powers of Majipoor must seem largely abstract figures, mythical, legendary, immaterial. On a planet so large as this no central authority could govern with real efficiency, only symbolic control; Valentine suspected that much of the stability of Majipoor depended on a social contract whereby the local governors—the provincial dukes and the municipal mayors—agreed to enforce and support the edicts of the imperial government, provided that they might do as they pleased within their own territories.

  How, he asked himself, can such a contract be upheld when the Coronal is not the anointed and dedicated prince, but some usurper, lacking in the grace of the Divine through which such fragile social constructs are sustained?

  He found himself thinking more and more upon such matters during the long, quiet, monotonous hours of the eastward journey. Such thoughts surprised him with their seriousness, for he had grown accustomed to the lightness and simplicity of his mind since the early days of Pidruid, and he could feel a progressive enrichment and growing complexity of mental powers now. It was as if whatever spell had been laid upon him was wearing thin, and his true intellect was beginning to emerge.

  If, that is, any such magic had actually befallen him as his gradually forming hypothesis required.

  He was still uncertain. But his doubts were weakening from day to day.

  In dreams now he often saw himself in positions of authority. One night it was he, not Zalzan Kavol, who led the band of jugglers; on another he presided in princely robes over some high council of the Metamorphs, whom he saw as eerie foglike wraiths that would not hold the same shape more than a minute at a time; a night later he had a vision of himself in the marketplace at Thagobar, dispensing justice to the cloth-sellers and vendors of bangles in their noisy little disputes.

  “You see?” Carabella said. “All these dreams speak of power and majesty.”

  “Power? Majesty? Sitting on a barrel in a market and expounding on equity to dealers in cotton and linen?”

  “In dreams many things are translated. These visions are metaphors of high might.”

  Valentine smiled. But he had to admit the plausibility of the interpretation.

  One night as they were nearing the city of Khyntor there came to him a most explicit vision of his supposed former life. He was in a room paneled with the finest and rarest of woods, glistening strips of semotan and bannikop and rich dark swamp mahogany, and he sat before a sharp-angled desk of burnished palisander, signing documents. The starburst crest was at his right hand; obsequious secretaries hovered about; and the enormous curving window before him revealed an open gulf of air, as though it looked out upon the titanic slope of Castle Mount. Was this a fantasy? Or was it some fugitive fragment of the buried past that had broken free and come floating up in his sleep to approach the surface of his conscious mind? He described the office and the desk to Carabella and to Deliamber, hoping they could tell him how the office of the Coronal looked in reality, but they had no more idea of that than they did of what the Pontifex had for breakfast. The Vroon asked him how he had perceived himself when sitting at that palisander desk; was he golden-haired, like the Valentine who rode in the jugglers’ wagon, or dark, like the Coronal who had made grand processional through Pidruid and the western provinces?

  “Dark,” said Valentine immediately. Then he frowned. “Or is that so? I was sitting at the desk, not looking at the man who was there because I was the man. And yet—and yet—”

  Carabella said, “In the world of dreams we often see ourselves with our own eyes.”

  “I could have been both fair and dark. Now one, now the other—the point escaped me. Now one, now the other, eh?”

  “Yes,” Deliamber said.

  They were almost into Khyntor now, after too many days of steady, wearying overland travel. This, the major city of north-central Zimroel, lay in rugged, irregular terrain, broken by lakes and highlands and dark, virtually impassable forests. The route chosen by Deliamber took the wagon through the city’s southwestern suburbs, known as Hot Khyntor because of the geothermal marvels there—great hissing geysers, and a broad steaming pink lake that bubbled and gurgled ominously, and a mile or two of gray rubbery-looking fumaroles from which, every few minutes, came clouds of greenish gases accompanied by comic belching sounds and deeper, stranger subterranean groans. Here the sky was heavy with big-bellied clouds the color of dull pearls, and although the last of summer still held the land, there was a cool autumnal quality to the thin, sharp wind that blew from the north.

  The River Zimr, largest in Zimroel, divided Hot Khyntor from the city proper. When the travelers came upon it, the wagon emerging suddenly from an ancient district of narrow streets to enter a broad esplanade leading to Khyntor Bridge, Valentine gasped with amazement.

  “What is it?” Carabella asked.

  “The river—I never expected it to be as big as this!”

  “Are rivers unfamiliar to you?”

  “There are none of any consequence between Pidruid and here,” he pointed out. “I remember nothing clearly before Pidruid.”

  “Compared with the Zimr,” said Sleet, “there are no rivers of any consequence anywhere. Let him be amazed.”

  To the right and left, so far as Valentine could see, the dark waters of the Zimr stretched to the horizon. The river was so broad here that it looked more like a bay. He could barely make out the square-topped towers of Khyntor on the far shore. Eight or ten mighty bridges spanned the waters here, so vast that Valentine wondered how it had been possible to build them at all. The one that lay directly ahead, Khyntor Bridge, was four highways wide, a structure of looping arches that rose and descended and rose and descended in great leaps from bank to bank; a short way downstream was a bridge of entirely different design, a heavy brick roadbed resting on astounding lofty piers, and just upstream was another that seemed made of glass, and gleamed with a dazzling brightness. Deliamber said, “That is Coronal Bridge, and to our right the Bridge of the Pontifex, and farther downstream is the one known as the Bridge of Dreams. All of them are ancient and famous.”

  “But why try to bridge the river at a place where it’s so wide?” Valentine asked in bewilderment.

  Deliamber said, “This is one of the narrowest points.”

  The Zimr’s course, declared the Vroon, was some seven thousand miles, rising northwest of Dulorn at the mouth of the Rift and flowing in a southeasterly direction across all of upper Zimroel toward the coastal city of Piliplok on the Inner Sea. This happy river, navigable for its entire length, was a swift and phenomenally broad stream that flowed in grand sweeping curves like some amiable serpent. Its shores were occupied by hundreds of wealthy cities, major inland ports, of which Khyntor was the most westerly. On the far side of Khyntor, running off to the northeast and only dimly visible in the cloudy sky, were the jagged peaks of the Khyntor Marches, nine great mountains on whose chilly flanks lived tribes of rough, high-spirited hunters. These people could be found in Khyntor much of the year, exchanging hides and meat for manufactured goods.

  T
hat night in Khyntor, Valentine dreamed he was entering the Labyrinth to confer with the Pontifex.

  This was no vague and misty dream, but one with sharp, painful clarity. He stood under harsh winter sunlight on a barren plain, and saw before him a roofless temple with flat white walls, which Deliamber told him was the gateway to the Labyrinth. The Vroon and Lisamon Hultin were with him, and Carabella too, walking in a protective phalanx, but when Valentine stepped out onto the bare slate platform between those white walls he was alone. A being of sinister and forbidding aspect confronted him. This creature was of alien shape, but belonged to none of the non-human forms long settled on Majipoor—neither Liiman nor Ghayrog nor Vroon nor Skandar nor Hjort nor Su-Suheris, but something mysterious and disturbing, a muscular thick-armed creature with cratered red skin and a blunt dome of a head out of which blazed yellow eyes bright with almost intolerable rage. This being demanded Valentine’s business with the Pontifex in a low, resonant voice.

  “Khyntor Bridge is in need of repair,” Valentine replied. “It is the ancient duty of the Pontifex to deal with such matters.”

  The yellow-eyed creature laughed. “Do you think the Pontifex will care?”

  “It is my responsibility to summon his aid.”

  “Go, then.” The guardian of the portal beckoned with sardonic politeness and stepped aside. As Valentine went past, the being uttered a chilling snarl, and slammed shut a gateway behind Valentine. Retreat was impossible. Before him lay a narrow winding corridor, sourcelessly lit by some cruel white light that numbed the eyes. For hours Valentine descended on a spiral path. Then the walls of the corridor widened, and he found himself in another roofless temple of white stone, or perhaps the same one as before, for the pockmarked red-skinned being again blocked his way, growling with that unfathomable anger.