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

“Carabella—”

  “You look so sad just now!”

  “I fear what comes.”

  “What comes,” she said, “is a necessary struggle, and joyous triumph, and the restoration of order. And if you would be a proper king, my lord, wave to your people, and smile, and put that tragic look from your face. Yes?”

  Valentine nodded. “You speak the truth,” he said, and catching up her hand, brushed his lips quickly but tenderly across her small sharp knuckles. And turned to stare at the multitudes who shouted his name, and lifted his arms to them and acknowledged their greeting.

  It seemed wondrously familiar to be riding into a great city down boulevards lined with cheering throngs. Valentine remembered, though it seemed like the memory of a dream, the beginnings of his abortive grand processional, when in the springtime of his reign he had gone by river to Alaisor on the western coast, and across to the Isle to kneel beside his mother at Inner Temple, and then on the great sea-journey westward to Zimroel, and crowds hailing him in Piliplok and Velathys and Narabal, down there in the lush leafy tropics. Those parades, those banquets, the excitement, the splendor, and then on to Til-omon, once more the crowds, once more the cries, “Valentine! Lord Valentine!” He remembered too in Til-omon a surprise, that Dominin Barjazid the son of the King of Dreams had come up from Suvrael to greet him and honor him in a feast, for the Barjazids customarily stayed down there in their sun-swept kingdom, dwelling apart from humanity, tending their dream-machines, sending forth their nightly messages to instruct and command and chastise. And the banquet at Til-omon, and the flask of wine from the hand of Barjazid, and the next thing Valentine knew he was staring down at the city of Pidruid from a limestone ridge, with muddled memories in his mind of having grown up in eastern Zimroel and somehow having wandered across the entire continent to its western shore. Now, so many months later, they were shouting his name again in the streets of a mighty city, after the long and strange interruption.

  In the royal suite at the mayoral palace Valentine summoned Mayor Haligorn, who still had a stunned and dazed look about him, and said, “I’ll need from you a flotilla of riverboats to take me up the Glayge to its rising. The costs will be met by the imperial treasury after the restoration.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And how many troops can you supply me?”

  “Troops?”

  “Troops, militia, warriors, bearers of arms. Do you follow my meaning, Mayor Haligorn?”

  The mayor showed dismay. “We of Pendiwane are not known for our skills in warfare, my lord.”

  Valentine smiled. “We are not known for our skills in warfare anywhere on Majipoor, the Divine be thanked. Nevertheless, peaceful though we are, we fight when we are threatened. The usurper threatens us all. Haven’t you felt the sting of strange new taxes and unfamiliar decrees in this year just past?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “But what?” Valentine asked sharply.

  “We assumed it was only a new Coronal, feeling his power.”

  “And you would blandly let yourselves be oppressed by the one whose role it is to serve you?”

  “My lord—”

  “Never mind. You have as much to gain as I in putting things to rights—do you see? Give me an army, Mayor Haligorn, and for thousands of years the bravery of the people of Pendiwane will be sung in our ballads.”

  “I am responsible for the lives of my people, my lord. I would not have them slain or—”

  “I am responsible for the lives of your people, and twenty billion others besides,” said Valentine briskly. “And if five drops of anyone’s blood are shed as I move toward Castle Mount, that will be six drops too many to suit me. But without an army I’m too vulnerable. With an army I become a royal presence, an imperial force moving toward a reckoning with the enemy. Do you understand, Haligorn? Call your people together, tell them what must be done, call for volunteers.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Haligorn, trembling.

  “And see to it that the volunteers are willing to volunteer!”

  “It will be done, my lord,” the mayor murmured.

  Assembling the army went faster than Valentine expected—a matter of days for choosing, equipping, and provisioning. Haligorn was cooperative indeed—as though he were eager to see Valentine rapidly on his way to some other region.

  The citizen-militia that had been scraped together to defend Pendiwane against an invading pretender now became the nucleus of the hastily constructed loyalist army—some twenty thousand men and women. A city of thirteen million might well have produced a larger force, but Valentine had no wish to disrupt Pendiwane to any greater extent. Nor had he forgotten his own axiom about juggling with clubs rather than with dwikka-trunks. Twenty thousand troops provided him with something that looked decently military, and it was his strategy, as it had been for a long while, to gain his purpose by gradual accumulation of support. Even the colossal Zimr, he reasoned, begins as mere trickles and rivulets somewhere in the northern mountains.

  They set forth on the Glayge on a day that was rainy before dawn, gloriously bright and sunny afterward. Every riverboat for fifty miles on either side of Pendiwane had been commandeered for army transport. Serenely the great flotilla moved northward, the green-and-gold banners of the Coronal waving in the breeze.

  Valentine stood near the prow of his flagship. Carabella was beside him, and Deliamber, and Admiral Asenhart of the Isle. The rain-washed air smelled sweet and clean: the good fresh air of Alhanroel, blowing toward him from Castle Mount. It was a fine feeling to be on his way home at last.

  These riverboats of eastern Alhanroel were more streamlined, less fancifully baroque than the ones Valentine had known on the Zimr. They were big, simple vessels, high of draft and narrow of beam, with powerful engines designed to drive them against the strong flow of the Glayge.

  “The river is swift against us,” said Asenhart.

  “As well it should be,” Valentine said. He pointed toward some invisible summit far to the north and high in the sky. “It rises on the lower slopes of the Mount. In its few thousand miles it drops almost ten, and all the weight of the water comes rushing against us as we go toward the source.”

  The Hjort seaman smiled. “It makes ocean sailing seem like child’s play, to think of coping with such a force. Rivers always were strange to me—so narrow, so quick. Give me the open sea, dragons and all, and I’m happy.”

  But the Glayge, though swift, was tame. Long ago it had been a thing of rapids and waterfalls, ferocious and all but unnavigable for hundreds of miles. Fourteen thousand years of human settlement on Majipoor had changed all that. By dams, locks, bypass canals, and other devices, the Glayge, like all the Six Rivers that descended from the Mount, had been made to serve the needs of its masters through nearly all its course. Only in the lower stretches, where the flatness of the surrounding valley made flood-control an ongoing challenge, was there any difficulty, and that merely during seasons of heavy rain.

  And the provinces along the Glayge were tame as well: lush green farming country, interrupted by great urban centers. Valentine stared into the distance, narrowing his eyes against the brightness of the morning light and searching for the gray bulk of Castle Mount somewhere ahead; but, immense as it was, not even the Mount could be seen from two thousand miles away.

  The first important city upriver from Pendiwane was Makroprosopos, famed for its weavers and artists. As Valentine’s ship approached, he saw that the waterfront of Makroprosopos was bedecked with mammoth Coronal-ensigns, probably hastily woven, and even more were still being hung.

  Sleet said thoughtfully, “Do those flags mean defiant expression of loyalty to the dark Coronal, I wonder, or capitulation to your claim?”

  “Surely they pay homage to you, my lord,” Carabella said. “They know you’re advancing up the river—therefore they put out flags to welcome you!”

  Valentine shook his head. “I think these folk are merely being cautious. If things go bad
ly for me on Castle Mount, they can always claim that those were ensigns of loyalty to the other. And if he is the one who falls, they can say they were second only to Pendiwane in recognizing me. I think we ought not to allow them the luxury of such ambiguities. Asenhart?”

  “My lord?”

  “Take us to harbor at Makroprosopos.”

  For Valentine it was something of a gamble. There was no real need to land here, and the last thing he wanted was a battle at some irrelevant city far from the Mount. But to test the effectiveness of his strategy was important.

  That test was passed almost at once. He heard the cheering when he was still far from shore: “Long life to Lord Valentine! Long life to the Coronal!”

  The Mayor of Makroprosopos came scurrying to the pier to greet him, bearing gifts, great generous bales of his city’s finest fabrics. He fell all over himself bowing and scraping, and was pleased to arrange a levy of eight thousand of his citizens to join the army of restoration.

  “What is happening?” Carabella asked quietly. “Will they accept anyone as Coronal who claims the throne loudly enough and waves a few energy-throwers around?”

  Valentine shrugged. “These are peaceful folk, comfortable, luxury-loving, timid. They’ve known only prosperity for thousands of years, and they want nothing but thousands more of it. The idea of armed resistance is foreign to them, so they yield quickly when we come sailing in.”

  “Aye,” said Sleet, “and if the Barjazid comes here next week, they’ll bow down just as willingly to him.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps. But I’m gaining momentum. As these cities join me, others farther up will fear to hold back their allegiance. Let it come to be a stampede, eh?”

  Sleet scowled. “All the same, what you’re doing now, someone else can do another time, and I don’t like it. What if a red-haired Lord Valentine appears next year, and says he’s the true Coronal? What if some Liiman shows up, insisting that everyone kneel to him, that the rivals are mere sorcerers? This world will dissolve into madness.”

  “There is only one anointed Coronal,” said Valentine calmly, “and the people of these cities, whatever their motives, are simply bowing to the will of the Divine. Once I’ve returned to Castle Mount there’ll be no further usurpers and no further pretenders, I promise you that!”

  Yet privately he recognized the wisdom of what Sleet had said. How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Goodwill alone is all that sustains it. Now Dominin Barjazid had shown that treachery could undo goodwill, and Valentine was discovering—thus far—that intimidation could counter treachery. But would Majipoor ever be the same again, Valentine wondered, when all this conflict was ended?

  7

  After Makroprosopos was Apocrune, and then Stangard Falls, and Nimivan, Threiz, South Gayles, and Mitripond. All of these cities, with some fifty million people among them, lost no time in accepting the sovereignty of the fair-haired Lord Valentine.

  It was as Lord Valentine had expected. These river-dwellers lacked the taste for warfare, and no one city cared to make a stand in battle for the sake of determining which of the rivals might be the true Coronal. Now that Pendiwane and Makroprosopos had yielded, the rest were eagerly falling into line; but these victories were trivial, he knew, for the river-cities would change allegiance again just as readily if they saw the tides of fortune swinging toward the darker overlord. Legitimacy, anointedness, the will of the Divine, all these things meant far less in the real world than one raised in the courts of Castle Mount might believe.

  Still, better to have the nominal support of the river-cities than to have them scoff at his claim. At each, he decreed a new troop-levy—but a minor one, only a thousand per city, for his army was growing too large too soon, and he feared unwieldiness. He wished he knew what Dominin Barjazid thought of the events along the Glayge. Did he cower in the Castle, fearing that all the billions of Majipoor were marching angrily toward him? Or was he only biding his time, preparing his inner line of defense, ready to bring the entire realm down in chaos before he yielded possession of the Mount?

  The river-journey continued.

  Now the land was rising steeply. They were on the fringes of the great plateau, where the planet swelled and puckered into its mighty upjutting limb, and there were days when the Glayge seemed to rise before them like a vertical wall of water.

  This now was familiar territory to Valentine, for in his youth on the Mount he had gone often to the headwaters of each of the Six Rivers, hunting and fishing with Voriax or Elidath or merely escaping a bit from the complexities of his education. His memory was nearly totally restored to him, the healing process having continued steadily ever since his stay on the Isle, and the sight of these well-known places sharpened and brightened his images of that past which Dominin Barjazid had tried to snatch from him. In the city of Jerrik, here in the narrower reaches of the upper Glayge, Valentine had gambled all night with an old Vroon not much unlike Autifon Deliamber, though he remembered him as less dwarfish, and in that endless rolling of the dice he had lost his purse, his sword, his mount, his title of nobility, and all his lands except one small bit of swamp, and then had won it all back before dawn—though he always suspected his companion had prudently chosen to reverse his flow of success rather than try to make good his winnings. It had been a useful lesson, at any rate. And at Ghiseldorn, where people dwelled in tents of black felt, he and Voriax had enjoyed a night of pleasure with a dark-haired witch at least thirty years old, who had awed them in the morning by casting their futures with pingla-seeds and proclaiming that they both were destined to be kings. Voriax had been greatly troubled by that prophecy, Valentine recalled, for it seemed to say that they would rule jointly as Coronal, in the way that they had jointly embraced the witch, and that was unheard of in the history of Majipoor. It had not occurred to either of them that she was saying that Valentine would be the successor of Voriax. And in Amblemorn, the most southwesterly of the Fifty Cities, an even younger Valentine had fallen heavily while racing through the forest of pygmy trees with Elidath of Morvole, and had cracked the big bone in his left leg with frightful pain, so that the jagged end stuck through the skin, and Elidath, though half sick with shock himself, had to adjust the fracture before they could go for help. Ever after there had been a slight limp in that leg—but leg and limp as well, Valentine thought with some strange delight, now belonged to Dominin Barjazid, and this body they had given him was whole and flawless.

  All those cities, and a good many more, surrendered to him as he arrived at them. Some fifty thousand troops now followed his banner, here at the edge of Castle Mount.

  Amblemorn was as far as the army could travel by water. The river here became a maze of tributaries, shallow of channel and impossibly steep of grade. Valentine had sent Ermanar and ten thousand warriors ahead to arrange for land-vehicles. So potent now was the gathering force of Valentine’s name that Ermanar, without opposition, had been able to requisition virtually every floater-car in three provinces, and an ocean of vehicles waited in Amblemorn by the time the main body of troops arrived.

  Commanding an army so large was no longer a task Valentine alone could handle. His orders descended through Ermanar, his field marshal, to five high officers, each of whom was given charge of a division: Carabella, Sleet, Zalzan Kavol, Lisamon Hultin, and Asenhart. Deliamber was ever at Valentine’s side with advice; and Shanamir, now not at all boyish, but much toughened and grown since his days herding mounts in Falkynkip, served as chief liaison officer, keeping communications channels open.

  Three days were needed to complete the mobilization. “We are ready to begin moving, my lord,” Shanamir reported. “Shall I give the order?”

  Valentine nodded. “Tell the first column to get going. We’ll be past Bimbak by noon, if we start now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And—Shanamir?”

  “Sir?”

  “I know this is war, but you don’t have to look so serious all the
time. Eh?”

  “Do I look too serious, my lord?” Shanamir reddened. “But this is a serious matter! This is the soil of Castle Mount beneath our feet!” Simply saying that seemed to awe him, this farmboy from far-off Falkynkip.

  Valentine understood how he must feel. Zimroel seemed a million miles away.

  He smiled and said, “Tell me, Shanamir, do I have it right? A hundred weights make a crown, ten crowns make a royal, and the price of these sausages is—”

  Shanamir looked puzzled; then he smirked and fought to hold back laughter, and finally let the laughter come. “My lord!” he cried, tears at the edge of his eyes.

  “Remember, there in Pidruid? When I would have bought sausages with a fifty-royal piece? Remember when you thought I was a simpleton? ‘Easy of mind’; that’s the phrase you used. Easy of mind. I suppose I was a simpleton, those first days in Pidruid.”

  “A long time ago, my lord.”

  “Indeed. And perhaps I’m a simpleton still, clambering up Castle Mount like this to try to snatch back that grinding, wearying job of governing. But perhaps not. I hope not, Shanamir. Remember to smile more often, that’s all. Tell the first column to start moving out.”

  The boy ran off. Valentine watched him go. So far away, Pidruid, so remote in time and space, a million miles, a million years. So it seemed. And yet it was only a year and some months ago that he had perched on that ledge of white stone on that hot sticky day, looking down into Pidruid and wondering what to do next. Shanamir, Sleet, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol! All those months of juggling in provincial arenas, and sleeping on straw mattresses in flea-infested country inns! What a wonderful time that had been, Valentine thought—how free, how light a life. Nothing more important to do than get hired in the next town down the road, and make sure that you didn’t drop your clubs on your foot. He had never been happier. How good it had been of Zalzan Kavol to take him into the troupe, how kind of Sleet and Carabella to train him in their art. A Coronal of Majipoor among them, and they never knew! Who among them could have imagined then that before they were much older they would be jugglers no longer, but rather generals, leading an army of liberation against Castle Mount?