“And I wish you a safe voyage home.”
He turned away.
“One thing,” the captain said.
“Yes?”
“When the woman called to you from down there,” she said, “she hailed you as Lord Valentine. What was the meaning of that?”
“A joke,” said Valentine. “Only a joke.”
“Lord Valentine is how the new Coronal is named, so I have been told, the one that rules since a year or two past.”
“Yes,” Valentine said. “But he is a dark-haired man. It was only a joke, a play on names, for I am Valentine too. A safe journey, Namurinta.”
“A fruitful pilgrimage, Valentine.”
He walked toward the cliff. The gardeners had taken several of the floater-sleds from the shack, and had placed them in riding sequence on the thrusting-pad. Silently they gestured the travelers aboard. Valentine mounted the first sled, with Carabella, Deliamber, Shanamir, and Khun. The female gardener went into the shack, where, it seemed, the controls of the floaters must be located, for an instant afterward the sled drifted free of the pad and began the dizzying, terrifying ascent of the towering white cliff.
8
“You have come,” said the acolyte Talinot Esulde, “to the Terrace of Assessment. Here you will be weighed in the balance. When it is time to move onward, your path takes you to the Terrace of Inception, and then to the Terrace of Mirrors, where you will confront yourself. If what you see is satisfactory to you and your guides, you move inward to Second Cliff, where another group of terraces awaits you. And so you proceed until the Terrace of Adoration. There, if the favor of the Lady is upon you, you will receive your summons to Inner Temple. But I would not expect that to happen quickly. I would not expect that to happen at all. Those who expect to attain the Lady are the least likely to reach her.”
Valentine’s mood darkened at that, for not only did he expect to attain the Lady, it was absolutely vital that he do so; and yet he understood what the acolyte was saying. In this holy place one made no demands on the fabric of existence. One surrendered; one gave up demands and needs and desires; one yielded, if one hoped to find peace. This was no place for a Coronal. The essence of a Coronal’s being was the wielding of power, wisely if he was capable of wisdom, but in any event steadfastly; the essence of a pilgrim was surrender. In that contradiction he might easily be lost. Yet he had no choice but to go to the Lady.
He had, at least, reached the outer fringes of the Lady’s domain. At the top of the cliff they had been greeted by unsurprised acolytes, plainly aware that out-of-season pilgrims were floating toward them. And now, looking pious and faintly absurd in the soft pale robes of pilgrims, they were gathered in a low long building of smooth pink stone near the crest of the cliff. Flags of the same pink stone formed a massive semicircular promenade that stretched for what appeared to be a great distance along the edge of the forest that topped the cliff: this was the Terrace of Assessment. Beyond it lay more forest; the other terraces were farther beyond; and deeper in, not visible from where they were now, rose the second chalk cliff atop the plateau that the outer one formed. A third cliff yet, Valentine knew, rose above the second somewhere hundreds of miles inland, and this was the holiest precinct, where Inner Temple was, where the Lady dwelled. For all that he had traveled so far, it seemed impossible that he would ever complete those last few hundreds of miles.
Night was falling swiftly. He could look back through the circular window behind him and see the darkening sky and the broad dark bosom of the sea, lit only by the purpling light of the vanishing sun as it fled toward Piliplok. There was a speck out there, a scratch on the smooth surface of the water, that he thought and hoped was the trimaran Rodamaunt Queen, heading homeward, and out there too were the volevants dreaming their endless dream, and the sea-dragons making their way toward a greater sea, and beyond all that was Zimroel, its teeming cities, its forest preserves and parklands, its festivals, its billions of souls. There was much for him to look back on; but now he must look forward. He stared intently at Talinot Esulde, their first guide in this place, a tall slender person with milk-white skin and a shaven skull, who might be of either sex. Male was Valentine’s guess—the height and something about the breadth of shoulders argued that, though not absolutely—but the delicacy of Talinot Esulde’s facial bones, notably the fragile curve of the light ridges above the strange blue eyes, argued otherwise.
Talinot Esulde was explaining things: the daily routine of prayer and work and meditation, the system of dream-speaking, the arrangement of living-quarters, the dietary restrictions, which excluded all wines and certain spices, and much else. Valentine tried to master it all, but there were so many regulations and requirements and obligations and customs that they tangled in his mind, and he ceased making the effort after a time, hoping that daily practice would instill the rules in him.
As darkness came Talinot Esulde led them from the indoctrination hall, past the sparkling spring-fed rock pool where they had been bathed before being given their robes and where they would bathe twice each day until they left this terrace, and to the dining-hall, farther from the cliff’s rim. Here they were served a simple meal of soup and fish, flavorless and unappealing even though they were furiously hungry. Their servitors were novices like themselves, in robes of light green. The hall, a large one, was only partly full—the hour for dining was almost past, Talinot Esulde pointed out. Valentine looked at his fellow pilgrims. They were of all sorts, perhaps half of human stock, but also a great many Vroons and Ghayrogs, a sprinkling of Skandars, some Liimen, some Hjorts though not very many, and, far across the way, a little insular Su-Suheris group. The net of the Lady caught all the races of Majipoor, it would seem. All but one. “Do Metamorphs ever seek the Lady?” Valentine asked.
Talinot Esulde smiled seraphically. “If a Piurivar came to us, we would accept it. But they take no part in our rites. They live to themselves as though they were alone on all of Majipoor.”
“Perhaps some have come here disguised in other forms,” Sleet suggested.
“We would know that,” said Talinot Esulde calmly.
After dinner they were taken to their rooms—individual chambers, hardly bigger than closets, in a hivelike lodge, A couch, a sink, a place for clothes, and nothing more. Lisamon Hultin glowered at hers. “No wine,” she said, “and I give up my sword, and now I sleep in this box? I think I’m going to be a failure as a pilgrim, Valentine.”
“Peace, and make the effort. We’ll travel through the Isle as swiftly as we can.”
He entered his room, which was between the warrior-woman’s and Carabella’s. Immediately the lightglobe dimmed, and when he settled in on his couch he found himself disappearing instantly into sleep, though the hour was still early. As consciousness left him a new light glowed softly in his mind, and he beheld the Lady, the unmistakable, unquestionable Lady of the Isle.
Valentine had seen her in dreams many times before since Pidruid, the gentle eyes, the dark hair, the flower at her ear, the olive-hued skin, but now the image was sharper, the vision more detailed, and he noticed the small lines in the corners of her eyes and the tiny green jewels set in her earlobes and the thin silver band that encircled her brow. In his dream he held his hands to her and said, “Mother, here I am. Call me to you, Mother.”
She smiled at him, but she made no answer.
They were in a garden, with alabandinas in bloom all about them. She nipped at the plants with a small golden implement, clipping away flower buds so the remaining ones would yield larger blossoms. He stood beside her, waiting for her to turn to him, but the work of nipping went on and on, and finally she said, still not looking his way, “One must give constant attention to one’s task if it is to be done properly.”
“Mother, I am Valentine, your son!”
“See, each branch has five buds? Let them be and they all will open, but I take two away here, one here, one here, and the blooms are glorious.” And as she spoke the buds unfurled, an
d the alabandinas filled the air with a fragrance so keen it stunned him, while the great yellow petals stretched forth like platters, revealing the black stamens and pistils within. She touched them lightly, sending a scattering of purple pollen into the air. And said, “You are who you are, and always will be.” The dream changed, then, with nothing of the Lady remaining in it, but only a bower of thorny bushes waving rigid arms at him, and moleeka-birds of colossal size strutting about, and other images, confused and ever-altering and telling him nothing that had coherent pattern.
When he woke he was expected to report at once to his dream-speaker, not Talinot Esulde but another acolyte of the guide level, this a person named Stauminaup, shaven also and also of ambiguous sex, but more likely than not a woman. These acolytes were of a medium level of initiation, Valentine had learned yesterday. They returned from Second Cliff to serve the needs of novices here.
Dream-speaking on the Isle was nothing like that which he had experienced in Falkynkip with Tisana. There were no drugs, there was no lying-together of bodies. He merely came into the presence of the speaker and described his dream. Stauminaup listened impassively. Valentine suspected that the speaker had had access to his dream as he was experiencing it, and merely wanted to contrast Valentine’s account of it with her own perceptions, to see what gulfs and contradictions might lie between. Therefore he presented the dream exactly as he recalled it, saying, as he had in sleep, “Mother, I am Valentine, your son!” and studying Stauminaup for a reaction to that. But he might as well have been studying the chalk face of the cliff.
When he was done the speaker said, “And what color were the alabandina blooms?”
“Why, yellow, with black centers!”
“A lovely flower. In Zimroel the alabandinas are scarlet, and yellow at the center. Do you like the colors of yours better?”
“I have no preference,” said Valentine.
Stauminaup smiled. “The alabandinas of Alhanroel are yellow, with black centers. You may go now.”
The speakings were much the same every day: a cryptic comment, or one that was perhaps not so cryptic, but lay open to varying interpretations, only no interpretations ever were offered. Stauminaup was like a repository for his dreams, absorbing them without providing counsel. Valentine became accustomed to that.
He became accustomed, too, to the daily routines of labor. He worked in the garden two hours each morning, doing minor trimming and weeding and much turning of soil, and in the afternoons he was a mason, taking instruction in the art of pointing the flagstones of the terrace. There were long sessions of meditation in which he was given no guidance whatever, only sent off to his room to stare at the walls. He saw hardly anything of his companions of the journey, except when they bathed together, at mid-morning and again just before dinner, in the sparkling pool; and they had little to say. It was easy to get into the rhythm of this place and cast aside all urgencies. The tropic air, the perfume of millions of blossoms, the gentle tone of everything that went on here, lulled and soothed like a warm bath.
But Alhanroel lay thousands of miles to the east, and he was moving not an inch toward his goal so long as he remained at the Terrace of Assessment. Already a week had gone by. During his meditation sessions Valentine entertained fantasies of collecting his people and slipping away by night, passing illicitly through terrace after terrace, scaling Second Cliff and Third, presenting himself ultimately to the Lady at the threshold of her temple; but he suspected they would not get far, in a place where dreams were open books.
So he fretted. He knew that fretting would win him no advancement here, and he taught himself instead to relax, to give himself up utterly to his tasks, to clear his mind of all needs and compulsions and attachments, and thus to open the way toward the dream of summoning by which the Lady would beckon him inward. That had no effect either. He plucked weeds, he cultivated the warm rich soil, he carried buckets of mortar and grout to the farthest reaches of the terrace, he sat crosslegged in his meditation hours with his mind entirely empty, and night after night he went to bed praying that the Lady would appear and tell him, “It is time for you to come to me,” but nothing happened.
“How long will this continue?” he asked Deliamber at the pool one day. “It’s the fifth week! Or maybe the sixth—I’m losing count. Do I stay here a year? Two? Five?”
“Some of the pilgrims among us have done just that,” said the Vroon. “I spoke with one, a Hjort who served in patrols under Lord Voriax. She has spent four years here and seems quite resigned to staying at the outermost terrace forever.”
“She has no need to go elsewhere. This is a pleasant enough inn, Deliamber. But I—”
“—have urgent appointments to the east,” Deliamber said. “And therefore you are condemned to remain here. There’s a paradox in your dilemma, Valentine. You strive to renounce purpose; but your renunciation itself has a purpose. Do you see? Your speaker surely does.”
“Of course I see. But what do I do? How do I pretend not to care whether I stay here forever?”
“Pretense is impossible. The moment you genuinely don’t care, you’ll move onward. Not until then.”
Valentine shook his head. “That’s like telling me that my salvation depends on never thinking of gihorna-birds. The harder I’d try not to think of them, the more flocks of gihornas would fly through my mind. What am I to do, Deliamber?”
But Deliamber had no other suggestions. The next day, Valentine learned that Shanamir and Vinorkis had received advancement to the Terrace of Inception.
Two more days passed before Valentine saw Deliamber again. The wizard remarked that Valentine did not look well; and Valentine replied, with an impatience he could not control, “How do you expect me to look? Do you know how many weeds I’ve pulled, how much masonry I’ve pointed, while in Alhanroel a Barjazid sits on Castle Mount and—”
“Peace,” Deliamber said softly. “This is not like you.”
“Peace? Peace? How long can I be peaceful?”
“Perhaps your patience is being tested. In which case, my lord, you are failing the test.”
Valentine considered that. After a moment he said, “I admit your logic. But perhaps it’s my ingenuity that’s being tested. Deliamber, put a summoning-dream into my head tonight.”
“My sorceries, you know, seem of little value on this island.”
“Do it. Try it. Concoct a message from the Lady and plant it in my mind, and then we’ll see.”
Deliamber, shrugging, touched his tentacles to Valentine’s hands for the moment of thought-transference. Valentine felt the faint distant tingle of contact.
“Your sorceries still work,” he said.
And that night there came to him a dream in which he drifted like a volevant in the bathing-pool, attached to the rocks by some membrane that had sprouted from his feet, and as he sought to free himself the face of the Lady appeared, smiling, in the night sky, and whispered to him, “Come, Valentine, come to me, come,” and the membrane dissolved, and he floated upward and soared on the breeze, borne by the wind toward Inner Temple.
Valentine relayed the dream to Stauminaup in his dream-speaking session. She listened as though he were telling her of a dream of plucking weeds in the garden. The next night Valentine pretended he had had the same dream, and again she made no comment. He offered the dream on the next, and asked for a speaking of it.
Stauminaup said, “The speaking of your dream is that no bird flies with another’s wings.”
His cheeks reddened. He went slinking away from her chamber.
Five days later, he was told by Talinot Esulde that he had been granted admission to the Terrace of Inception.
“But why?” he asked Deliamber.
The Vroon replied. “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress. Obviously something has altered in you.”
“But I’ve had no legitimate summoning dream!”
“Perhaps you have,” said the sorcerer.
One of the acoly
tes took him, by foot, through the forest paths to the next terrace. The road was a maze, zigzagging bewilderingly, several times requiring them to turn in what seemed like precisely the wrong direction. Valentine was altogether lost by the time they emerged, some hours later, into a cleared area of immense size. Pyramids of dark blue stone ten feet high rose there at regular intervals from the pink flagstone of the terrace.
Life was much the same here—menial tasks, meditation, daily dream-speaking, stark ascetic quarters, drab food. But there was also the beginning of holy instruction, an hour each afternoon in which the principles of the grace of the Lady were explained by means of elliptical parables and circuitous dialogues.
Valentine listened restlessly to all that at first. It seemed vague and abstract to him, and it was hard to concentrate on such cloudy matters when what possessed him was a direct political passion—to reach Castle Mount and settle the questioning of the governing of Majipoor. But by the third day it struck him that what the acolyte was saying about the role of the Lady was entirely political. She was a tempering force, Valentine realized, a mortar of love and faith binding together the centers of power on this world. However she worked her magic of dream-sending—and it was impossible to believe the popular myth, that she was in touch with the minds of millions of people every night—it was clear that her calm spirit soothed and eased the planet. The apparatus of the King of Dreams, Valentine knew, sent direct and specific dreams that lashed the guilty and admonished the uncertain, and the sendings of the King could be fierce. But as the warmth of the ocean moderates the climate of the land, so did the Lady make gentle the harsh forces of control on Majipoor, and the theology that had arisen around the person of the Lady as Divine Mother Incarnate was, Valentine now understood, only a metaphor for the division of power that the early rulers of Majipoor had devised.
So he listened with keener interest. He put aside his eagerness to move to loftier terraces for a time, in order to learn more here.