“Nor is the King of Dreams precisely a disinterested party in this war,” Deliamber said. “We should make them aware of that too—that he stands to gain from his son’s treachery.”
“We will,” said the hierarch Lorivade vehemently. “Out of the Isle now are coming the sendings of the Lady with redoubled force. They’ll counteract the King’s poisonous dreams. Last night as I slept she came to me and showed me what kind of message will go forth. It is the vision of the drugging at Til-omon, the changing of the Coronal. She will show them your new face, Lord Valentine, and will surround you with the radiance of the Coronal, the starburst of authority. And will portray the fake Coronal as a traitor, mean and dark of spirit.”
“When will this begin?” Valentine asked.
“She waits for your approval.”
“Then open your mind to the Lady today,” he told the hierarch, “and tell her that the sendings must start.”
Khun of Kianimot said quietly, “How strange this seems to me! A war of dreams! If ever I doubted I was on an alien world, these strategies would make it certain to me.”
Valentine said, with a smile, “Better to fight with dreams than with swords and energy-throwers, friend. What we seek is best won by persuasion, not by killing.”
“A war of dreams,” Khun repeated, bemused. “We do things differently on Kianimot. Who’s to say which way makes more sense? But I think there’ll be fighting as well as sendings before this is done, Lord Valentine.”
Valentine looked somberly at the blue-skinned being. “I fear you are right,” he said.
Five days more and they were in the outlying suburbs of Pendiwane. By now news of their advance had spread throughout the countryside; farmers stopped in their fields to stare as the cavalcade of vehicles floated by, the crowds thronged the highway in the more thickly populated sectors.
Valentine found this all to the good. Thus far no hands were being lifted against them. They were regarded as curiosities, not as menaces. More than that he could not ask.
But when they were a day’s journey outside of Pendiwane, the advance party returned with news that a force was gathered to meet them near the city’s western gate.
“Soldiers?” Valentine asked.
“Citizen-militia,” said Ermanar. “Hastily organized, from the looks of them. They wear no uniforms, only ribbons round their arms, with the starburst emblem on it.”
“Excellent. The starburst is consecrated to my favor. I’ll go to them and ask their allegiance.”
Vinorkis said, “What will you wear, my lord?”
Puzzled, Valentine indicated the simple clothes in which he had been traveling since the Isle of Sleep, a white belted tunic and a light overblouse.
“Why, these, I suppose,” he said.
The Hjort shook his head. “You should wear finery, and a crown, I think. I think it very strongly.”
“My thought was not to appear overly ostentatious. If they see a man in a crown, whose face is not the face they know as Lord Valentine, usurper will be the first thought to come to their minds, will it not?”
“I think otherwise,” Vinorkis replied. “You come to them and say, I am your rightful king. But you don’t look like a king. A simple costume and easy manners may win you friends in quiet conversation, but not when large forces are assembled. You would do well to dress more awesomely.”
Valentine said, “My hope was to rely on simplicity and sincerity, as I have done ever since Pidruid.”
“Simplicity and sincerity, by all means,” said Vinorkis. “But also a crown.”
“Carabella? Deliamber? Advise me!”
“A little ostentation might not be harmful,” said the Vroon.
“And this will be your first public appearance as claimant to the Castle,” Carabella said. “Some look of regal splendor, I think, may serve you well.”
Valentine laughed. “I’ve grown away from such costumes in these many months of wandering, I fear. The idea of a crown now seems only comic to me. A thing of twisted metal, poking up from my scalp, a bit of jewelry—”
He stopped. He saw them all gaping at him.
“A crown,” he said in a less lighthearted tone, “is only an outward thing, a trinket, an ornament. Children might be impressed by such toys, but adult citizens who—”
He stopped again.
Deliamber said, “My lord, can you remember how you felt, the first time they came to you at the Castle and put the starburst upon your brow?”
“There was a chill down my back, I do confess.”
“Yes. A crown may be a child’s ornament, a silly trinket, true. But it is also a symbol of power, that sets the Coronal apart from all others, and transforms mere Valentine into Lord Valentine the heir of Lord Prestimion and Lord Confalume and Lord Stiamot and Lord Dekkeret. We live by such symbols. My lord, your mother the Lady did much to restore you to the person you were before Til-omon, but there is still a good deal of Valentine the juggler about you, even now. And that is not a bad thing. Still, more impressiveness and less simplicity is called for here, I suspect.”
Valentine was silent, thinking of Deliamber’s mumbling and waving his tentacles, and his own realization that sometimes one had to indulge in theatrics to achieve one’s proper effects. They were right and he was wrong.
He said, “Very well. I will wear a crown, if one can be fashioned for me in time.”
One of Ermanar’s men quickly assembled one for him out of scraps of a defective floater-engine, the only spare metal that was at hand. Considering its hastily improvised nature, it was a decent job of crown-making, Valentine thought, the joinings not too rough, the spokes of the starburst reasonably equally spaced, the inner orbits of the armature smoothly coiled. Of course it was nothing to compare with the authentic crown, with its inlays and chasings of seven different precious metals, its finials of rare gems, its three gleaming diniaba-stones mounted on the browband. But that crown—made in the great reign of Lord Confalume, who must have taken a hearty joy in all the trappings of imperial pomp—was elsewhere at the moment, and this one, once it took its place upon his consecrated brow, would most likely magically invest itself with the proper grandeur. Valentine held it in his hands a long moment. Despite the scorn for such things he had expressed the day before, he felt a little awed by it himself.
Deliamber said mildly, “The militia of Pendiwane are waiting, my lord.”
Valentine nodded. He was garbed in borrowed finery, a green doublet that belonged to one of Ermanar’s comrades, a yellow cloak that Asenhart had produced, a heavy golden chain belonging to the hierarch Lorivade, high glossy boots lined with the white fur of the northern steetmoy, that were contributed by Nascimonte. Not since the ill-fated banquet in Til-omon, when he had worn another body entirely, had he dressed with such gaudiness. It was a strange feeling to be clad so pretentiously. He lacked only the crown.
He started to put it on, and stopped abruptly, realizing that there was history in this moment, whether he liked the idea or not: the first time he donned the starburst in this his second incarnation. Suddenly this event began to seem less like a masquerade and more like a coronation. Valentine looked around uneasily.
“I should not put this on my head myself,” he said. “Deliamber, you’re my chief minister. You do it.”
“My lord, I am not tall enough.”
“I could kneel.”
“That would not be fitting,” said the Vroon, a little sharply.
Plainly Deliamber did not want to do it. Valentine looked next toward Carabella. But she recoiled, horrified, whispering, “I am a commoner, my lord!”
“What does that have to do with—” Valentine shook his head. This was becoming an annoyance. They were making too much of an occasion out of it. He glanced around the group and saw the hierarch Lorivade, that cool-eyed and stately woman, and said, “You are the representative of the Lady my mother in this group, and you are a woman of rank. May I ask you—”
But Lorivade said gravely, ??
?The crown, my lord, descends to the Coronal by authority of the Pontifex. It seems more fitting that Ermanar place it on you, as the highest official of the Pontifex among us today.”
Valentine sighed and turned to Ermanar. “I suppose that’s right. Will you do it?”
“It will be a great honor, my lord.”
Valentine handed the crown to Ermanar and moved the silver circlet of his mother as far down his scalp as it would go. Ermanar, who was not a man of great height, took the crown in both hands, trembling a little, and reached up, straining to extend his arms. With great care he lowered the crown over Valentine’s head and slipped it into place. It fit perfectly.
“There,” Valentine said. “I’m glad that’s—”
“Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine! Long life to Lord Valentine!”
They were kneeling to him, making the starburst to him, shouting out his name, all of them. Sleet, Carabella, Vinorkis, Lorivade, Zalzan Kavol, Shanamir, everyone, Nascimonte, Asenhart Ermanar, even—surprisingly—the offworlder Khun of Kianimot.
Valentine gestured in protest, embarrassed at all this, wanting to tell them that this was no true ceremony, that it was done only for the sake of impressing the citizens of Pendiwane. But the words did not leave his throat, for he knew that they were untrue, that this improvised affair was in fact his second crowning. And he felt the chill down his spine, the shiver of wonder.
He stood with arms outspread, accepting their homage.
Then he said, “Come. On your feet, all of you. Pendiwane is waiting for us.”
The scouts’ report had it that the militia and the high personages of the city had been camped outside Pendiwane’s western gate for some days, awaiting his arrival. Valentine wondered what the condition of the townspeople’s nerves might be, after so long and uncertain a vigil, and what sort of reception they planned to give him.
It was only an hour’s ride to Pendiwane now. They moved quickly through a region of pleasant forests and broad, rolling, rain-sleekened meadows that soon gave way to agreeable residential districts, small stone houses with conical red-tiled roofs of the predominant style. The city ahead was a major one, capital of its province, with a population of twelve or thirteen million; it was chiefly a trade depot, Valentine recalled, through which the agricultural produce of the lower Glayge Valley was funneled on its way upriver to the Fifty Cities.
At least ten thousand militia waited at the gate.
They filled the road, and spilled over into the lanes of the marketplace that nestled against the outer wall of Pendiwane. They were armed with energy-throwers, though not a great many, and with simpler weapons, and those in the front line were standing in a tense, stiff manner, holding themselves self-consciously in soldierlike poses that surely were altogether unfamiliar to them. Valentine ordered the floater-cars to halt a few hundred yards from the nearest of them, so that the roadway between formed a wide clear space, a kind of buffer zone.
He stepped forth, crowned and robed and cloaked. The hierarch Lorivade walked just to his right, clad in the glowing vestments of the Lady’s high ministry, and Ermanar was to his left, wearing on his breast the glittering Labyrinth emblem of the Pontifex. At Valentine’s rear were Zalzan Kavol and his formidable brothers, glowering and massive, followed by Lisamon Hultin in full battle regalia, with Sleet and Carabella flanking her. Autifon Deliamber rode on the arm of the giantess.
In a slow, easy, unmistakably majestic way, Valentine advanced into the open space before him. He saw the citizens of Pendiwane stirring, exchanging troubled glances, moistening their lips, shifting their feet, rubbing their hands over their chests or arms. A terrible silence had fallen.
He paused twenty yards from the front line and said, “Good people of Pendiwane, I am the rightful Coronal of Majipoor, and I ask your aid in regaining that which was granted to me by the will of the Divine and the decree of the Pontifex Tyeveras.”
Thousands of wide eyes stared rigidly at him. He felt wholly calm.
Valentine said, “I call forth from among you Duke Holmstorg of Glayge. I call forth from among you Redvard Haligorn, Mayor of Pendiwane.”
There were movements in the crowd. Then came a parting, and out from the midst emerged a rotund man in a blue tunic trimmed with orange, whose heavy-fleshed face seemed gray with fear or tension. The black sash of mayoralty lay across his broad chest. He took a few steps toward Valentine, hesitated, signaled furiously behind his back in what was meant to be a gesture unseen by those facing him; and after a moment five or six lesser municipal officials, looking as abashed and reluctant as children commanded to sing at a school assembly, came warily out behind the mayor.
The plump man said, “I am Redvard Haligorn. Duke Holmstorg has been summoned to Lord Valentine’s Castle.”
“We have met before, Mayor Haligorn,” said Valentine amiably. “Do you recall? It was some years ago, when my brother Lord Voriax was Coronal, and I journeyed to the Labyrinth as emissary to the Pontifex. I stopped in Pendiwane and you gave me a banquet, in the high palace at river’s edge. Do you recall, Mayor Haligorn? It was summer, a year of drought, the river was very much shrunken, nothing at all like it is today.”
Haligorn’s tongue traversed his lips. He tugged at a jowl.
Hoarsely he said, “Indeed he who became Lord Valentine was here in the dry year. But he was a dark man, and bearded.”
“True. There has been a witchery of fearful nature, Mayor Haligorn. A traitor now holds Castle Mount and I have been transformed and cast out. But I am Lord Valentine and by the power of the starburst you wear on your sleeve, I call upon you to accept me as Coronal.”
Haligorn looked bewildered. Clearly he would prefer to be almost anywhere else at this moment, even in the trackless corridors of the Labyrinth, or the burning wastes of Suvrael.
Valentine continued, “Beside me is the hierarch Lorivade of the Isle of Sleep, closest of the companions of my mother your Lady. Do you think she deceives you?”
The hierarch said icily, “This is the true Coronal, and the Lady will withdraw her sublime love from those who oppose him.”
Valentine said, “And here stands Ermanar, high servitor of the Pontifex Tyeveras.”
In his blunt straightforward way Ermanar said, “You have all heard the decree of the Pontifex that the fair-haired man must be hailed as Lord Valentine the Coronal. Who among you will stand up against the decree of the Pontifex?”
Haligorn’s face showed terror. Dealing with Duke Holmstorg might have been harder for Valentine, for he was of high blood and great haughtiness, and might not have been so easily intimidated by one who came before him wearing a homemade crown and leading a little band of such oddly assorted followers. But Redvard Haligorn, a mere elected official, who for years had dealt with nothing more challenging than state banquets and debates over flood-control taxes, was far beyond his depth.
He said, almost mumbling it, “The command has come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle that you are to be apprehended and bound over for trial.”
“Many commands lately have come down from Lord Valentine’s Castle,” said Valentine, “and not a few have been unwise, unjust, or ill-timed, eh, Mayor Haligorn? They are the commands of the usurper, and worthless. You have heard the voices of the Lady and the Pontifex. You have had sendings urging you to give allegiance to me.”
“And sendings of the other kind,” said Haligorn feebly.
“From the King of Dreams, yes!” Valentine laughed. “And who is the usurper? Who is it that has stolen the throne of the Coronal? Dominin Barjazid is the one! The son of the King of Dreams! Now do you comprehend those sendings out of Suvrael? Now do you see what has been done to Majipoor?”
Valentine let the trance-state come over him, and flooded the hapless Redvard Haligorn with the full force of his soul, the full impact of a waking sending from the Coronal.
Haligorn tottered. His face reddened and grew blotchy. He reeled and clutched at his comrades for support, but they had r
eceived the outflow from Valentine as well, and were barely able to sustain themselves.
Valentine said, “Give me your support, friends. Open your city to me. From here I will launch the reconquest of Castle Mount, and great will be the fame of Pendiwane, as the first city of Majipoor to turn against the usurper!”
6
So Pendiwane fell, without a blow being struck. Redvard Haligorn, wearing the expression of a man who has just swallowed a Stoienzar oyster and feels it squirming in his gullet, dropped down and offered Valentine the starburst gesture, and then two of his vice-mayors did the same, and suddenly there was a contagion of it, thousands of people giving homage, and crying out, first without much conviction, then more lustily as they decided to commit themselves to the idea: “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Long life to the Coronal!” And the gates of Pendiwane were opened.
“Too easy,” Valentine muttered to Carabella. “Can it continue this way right up Castle Mount? Browbeat a fat mayor or two and win back the throne by acclamation?”
“If only you could,” she said. “But the Barjazid waits up there with his bodyguards, and browbeating him will take more than words and fine dramatic effects. There will be battles, Valentine.”
“Let there be no more than one, then.”
She touched his arm lightly. “For your sake I hope no more than one, and that one just a small one.”
“Not for my sake,” he said. “For the sake of all the world. I want none of my people to perish in repairing what Dominin Barjazid has brought upon us.”
“I had not thought kings would be so gentle, my love,” Carabella said.