Collected Short Fiction, page 1010
“I had hoped,” Valentine said to Sleet, “that you would have some wisdom in these things.”
“I am a juggler. Find a speaker.”
“Can you recommend one in Pidruid?”
“We will be leaving Pidruid shortly. Wait until we are a few days’ journey from the city. You will have richer dreams to give the speaker by then.”
“I wonder if this is a sending,” said Valentine. “And from the King? What business would the King of Dreams have with a wanderer like me? I hardly think it possible. With twenty billion souls on Majipoor, how could the King find time to deal with any but the most important?”
“In Suvrael,” said Sleet, “at the palace of the King of Dreams, are great machines that scan this entire world and send messages into the minds of millions of people every night. Who knows how those millions are chosen? One thing they tell us when we are children, and I know it has truth: at least once before we leave this world, we will feel the touch of the King of Dreams against our spirit, each and all of us. I know that I have.”
“You?”
“More than once.” Sleet touched his lank coarse white hair. “Do you think I was born white-haired? One night I lay in a hammock in the jungles outside Narabal, no juggler then, and the King came to me as I slept and placed commands upon my soul, and when I awakened my hair was like this. I was twenty-three years old.”
“Commands?” Valentine blurted. “What commands?”
“Commands that turn a man’s hair from black to white between darkness and dawn,” Sleet said. Obviously he wished to say no more. He got to his feet and glanced at the morning sky as though checking the elevation of the sun. “I think we’ve had enough talk for now, friend. There still are crowns to earn at the festival. Would you learn a few new tricks before Zalzan Gibor sends us out to work?”
Valentine nodded. Sleet fetched balls and clubs; they went out into the courtyard.
“Watch,” said Sleet, and he stood close behind Carabella. She held two balls in her right hand, he one in his left, and they put their other arms around one another. “This is half-juggling,” Sleet said. “A simple thing even for beginners; but it looks extremely challenging.” Carabella threw; Sleet threw and caught; at once they were in the rhythm of interchange, easily passing the balls back and forth, one entity with four legs and two minds and two juggling arms. Indeed it did look taxing, Valentine thought. Sleet called out, “Feed the clubs to us now!”
Valentine did so, and as he delivered each club with a quick sharp toss to Carabella’s right hand, she worked it into the sequence, one, two, three, until balls and clubs flew from her to Sleet, from Sleet to her, in a dizzying cascade. Valentine knew from his own private trials how difficult it was to deal with that many objects. Five balls would be in his compass in another few weeks, he hoped; four clubs might be feasible soon too; but to handle three of each at the same time, and coordinate this half-juggling as well, was a feat that amazed him with admiration. And some jealousy too, he realized oddly, for here was Sleet with his body tight up against Carabella’s, forming a single organism with her, and only a few hours ago she had lain with him by that brook in the Pidruid park.
“Try it,” Sleet said.
He stepped aside and Carabella put herself in front of Valentine, arm and arm. They worked with three balls only. At first Valentine had problems judging the height and force of his throws and sometimes sent the ball popping beyond Carabella’s reach, but in ten minutes he had the knack of it and in fifteen they were working together as smoothly as if they had been doing the act for years. Sleet encouraged him with lively applause.
One of the Skandars appeared, not Zalzan Gibor but his brother Erfon, who even as Skandars went was dour and chill. “Are you ready?” he asked gruffly.
The troupe performed that afternoon in the private park of one of the powerful merchants of Pidruid, who was giving an entertainment for a provincial duke. Starday had been the great day of the festival, and the Coronal had withdrawn to some lofty retreat and would not be seen again by the ordinary folk of the city, but lesser spectacles were due to continue throughout the first half of the week, and the jugglers would be busy. Carabella and Valentine performed their new half-juggling routine; the Skandars did something flamboyant with dishes and crystal goblets and cooking pans; and, as a climax, Sleet was led forth to juggle blindfolded.
“Is this possible?” Valentine asked, awed.
“Watch!” said Carabella.
Valentine watched, but few others did, for this was Sunday after the great Starday frenzy, and the lordlings who had ordered this performance were a weary, jaded bunch, half asleep, bored with the skills of the musicians and acrobats and jugglers they had hired. Sleet stepped forward carrying three clubs and planted himself in a firm, confident way, standing a moment with his head cocked as though listening to the wind that blows between the worlds, and then, catching his breath sharply, he began to throw.
Zalzan Gibor boomed, “Twenty years of practice, lords and ladies of Pidruid! The keenest sense of hearing is necessary for this! He detects the rustle of the clubs against the atmosphere as they fly from hand to hand!”
Valentine wondered how even the keenest sense of hearing could detect anything, against the hum of conversation and the clink of dishes and the loud ostentatious pronouncements of Zalzan Gibor, but Sleet made no errors. That the juggling was difficult even for him was obvious: normally he was smooth as a machine, tireless as a loom, but now his hands were moving in sudden sharp skips and lunges, grasping hastily at a club that was spinning up almost out of reach, snatching with desperate quickness at one that had fallen nearly too far. Still, it was miraculous juggling. It was as if Sleet had some chart in his mind of the location of each of the moving clubs and put his hand where he expected a club to fall and found it there, or close enough. He did ten, fifteen, twenty exchanges of the clubs, and then gathered all three to his chest, flipped the blindfold aside, took a deep bow. There was a pattering of applause. Sleet stood rigid. Carabella came to him and embraced him, Valentine clapped him lustily on the shoulder, and the troupe left the stage.
In the dressing room Sleet was quivering from strain and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He gulped fireshower wine without restraint, as though it were nothing. “Did they pay attention?” he asked Carabella. “Did they even notice?”
“Some did,” she said gently.
Sleet spat. “Pigs! Blaves! They have not enough skill to walk from one side of a room to the other, and they sit there chattering when—when an artist—when—”
Valentine had never seen Sleet show temper before. This blind juggling, he decided, was not good for the nerves.
He seized the livid Sleet by both shoulders and leaned close into his face. “What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience. You were perfect.”
“Not quite,” Sleet said sullenly. “The timing—”
“Perfect,” Valentine insisted. “You were in complete command. You were majestic. How could you care what drunken merchants might say or do? Is it for their souls or yours that you mastered the art?”
Sleet managed a weak grin. “The blind juggling cuts deep into the soul.”
“I would not see you in such pain, my friend.”
“It passes. I feel a little better now.”
“Your pain was self-inflicted,” Valentine said. “It was unwise to allow yourself such outrage. I say again: you were perfect, and nothing else is important.” He turned to Shanamir. “Go out back to the kitchen and see if we might have some food. Sleet has worked too hard. He needs new fuel, and fireshower wine isn’t enough.”
Sleet looked merely tired now, instead of tense and furious. He reached forth a hand. “Your soul is warm and kind, Valentine. Your spirit is a gentle and sunny one.”
“Your pain pained me.”
“I’ll guard my wrath better,” Sleet said. “And you’re right, Valentine: we juggle for ourselves. They are incidental. I should not have forgotten that.”
Twice more in Pidruid Valentine saw the blind juggling done; twice more he saw Sleet stalk from a stage, rigid and drained. The attention of the onlookers, Valentine realized, had nothing to do with Sleet’s fatigue. It was a demonic hard thing to do, was all, and the price the small man paid for his skill was a high one. When Sleet suffered, Valentine did what he could to beam comfort and strength to him, and there was great pleasure for Valentine in serving the other man in that way.
Twice more, too, Valentine had dark dreams. One night the apparition of the Pontifex came to him and summoned him into the Labyrinth, and inward he went, down its many passageways and incomprehensible avenues, and the image of gaunt old Tyeveras floated like a will-o’-the-wisp before him, leading him onward to the core, until at last he attained some inner realm of the great maze, and suddenly the Pontifex vanished, and Valentine stood alone in a void of cold green light, all footing gone, falling endlessly toward the center of Majipoor. And another night it was the Coronal, riding in his chariot across Pidruid, who beckoned him and invited him to a game of counters, and they threw the dice and moved the markers, and what they played with was a packet of bleached knucklebones, and when Valentine asked whose bones they were, Lord Valentine laughed and tugged at his stiff black fringe of a beard and fastened his dazzling harsh eyes on him and said, “Look at your hands,” and Valentine looked, and his hands were without fingers, mere pink globes at his wrists.
These dreams Valentine shared once more with Carabella and with Sleet. But they offered him no dreamspeaking, only repeated their advice that he go to some priestess of the slumber-world once they had left Pidruid.
Departure now was imminent. The festival was breaking up; the Coronal’s ships no longer stood in the harbor; the roads were crowded with the outflow, as the people of the province made their way homeward from the capital. Zalzan Gibor instructed his troupe to finish whatever business remained to be done in Pidruid that morning, for on Seaday afternoon they would take to the highway.
The announcement left Shanamir strangely quiet and dejected. Valentine noticed the boy’s moodiness. “I thought you’d be eager to move along. Finding the city too exciting to leave?”
Shanamir shook his head. “I could go any time.”
“Then what is it?”
“Last night a dream came to me of my father and brothers.”
Valentine smiled. “Homesickness already, and you haven’t even left the province?”
“Not homesickness,” Shanamir said bleakly. “They were tied and lying in the road, and I was driving a team of mounts, and they cried out to me for help, and I drove right on, over their helpless bodies. One doesn’t have to go to a dream-speaker for understanding of a dream like that.”
“So is it guilt at abandoning your duties at home?”
“Guilt? Yes. The money!” Shanamir said. There was an edge on his voice, as though he were a man trying to explain something to a dull child. He tapped his waist. “The money, Valentine. I carry in here some hundred sixty royals from the sale of my animals, have you forgotten? A fortune! Enough to pay my family’s way all this year and part of next! They depend on my coming back safely to Falkynkip with it.”
“And you were planning not to give it to them?”
“I am hired by Zalzan Gibor, What if his route lies another way? If I bring the money home, I might never find you all again as you wander over Zimroel. If I go off with the jugglers, I steal my father’s money, that he’s expecting, that he needs. You see?”
“Simply enough solved,” Valentine said. “Falkynkip is how far from here?”
“Two days fast, three days ordinary.”
“Quite close. Zalzan Gibor’s route, I’m sure, has not yet been fixed. I’ll speak to him right now. One town’s as good as the next to him. I’ll cajole him into taking the Falkynkip road out of here. When we’re close to your father’s ranch, you’ll slip away by night, give the money quietly to one of your brothers, slip back to us before dawn. And then no guilt will attach, and you’ll be free to proceed on your way.”
Shanamir’s eyes widened. “You think you can win a favor from that Skandar? How?”
“I can try.”
“He’ll strike you to the ground in anger if you ask for anything. He wants no interference with his plans, any more than you’d allow a flock of blaves to vote on how you should run your affairs.”
“Let me talk to him,” said Valentine, “and we’ll see. I have reason to think Zalzan Gibor’s not as rough within as he’d like us to believe. Where is he?”
“Seeing after his wagon, readying it for the journey. Do you know where that is?”
“Toward the waterfront,” Valentine said. “Yes. I know.”
The jugglers traveled between cities in a fine wagon that Valentine had noticed several times, parked in a lot several blocks from the inn, for it was too broad of beam to bring down these narrow streets. It was an imposing and costly vehicle, noble and majestic, made with the finest workmanship by artisans of one of the inland provinces. The wagon’s main frame was of long pale spars of light, springy wingwood, cunningly laminated into wide arching strips with a colorless fragrant glue and bound with resilient withes found in the southern marshes. Over this elegant armature sheets of tanned stick-skin had been stretched and stitched into place with thick yellow fibers dawn from the stick-creatures’ own gristly bodies. The interior workmanship, Valentine suspected, was equally superb.
Approaching it now, Valentine found Erfon Gibor and another of the Skandars, Gibor Haem, diligently oiling the wagon’s traces, while from within came deep booming shouts of rage, so loud and violent that the wagon seemed to sway from side to side.
“Where is your brother?” Valentine asked.
Gibor Haem nodded sourly toward the wagon. “This would not be a wise moment to intrude.”
“I have business with him.”
“He has business,” said Erfon Gibor, “with the thieving little sorcerer we pay to guide us through the provinces, and who would resign our service in Pidruid just as we are making ready to leave. Go in, if you will, but you will regret it.”
The angry cries from the wagon grew more vociferous. Suddenly the door of the wagon burst open and a tiny figure sprang forth, a wizened old Vroon no bigger than a toy, a doll, a little feather-light creature waist-high to Valentine, with ropy tentacular limbs and skin of a faded greenish tint and huge golden eyes now bright with fear. A smear of something that might be pale yellow blood covered the Vroon’s angular cheek close beside its beak of a mouth.
Zalzan Gibor appeared an instant later, a terrifying figure in the doorway, his fur puffed with wrath, his vast basket-like hands impotently churning the air. To his brothers he cried, “Catch him! Don’t let him get away!”
Erfon Gibor and Gibor Haem rose ponderously and formed a shaggy wall blocking the Vroon’s escape. The little being, trapped, panicky, halted and whirled and threw himself against Valentine’s knees.
“Lord,” the Vroon murmured, clinging hard, “protect me! He is insane and would kill me in his anger!”
Zalzan Gibor said, “Hold him there, Valentine.”
The Skandar came forward. Valentine pushed the cowering Vroon out of sight behind him and faced Zalzan Gibor squarely. “Control your temper, if you will. Murder this Vroon and we’ll all be stuck in Pidruid forever.”
“I mean no murder,” Zalzan Gibor rumbled.
The Vroon said tremulously, “He means no murder, only to throw me against a wall with all his strength.”
Valentine said, “What is the quarrel? Perhaps I can mediate.”
Zalzan Gibor scowled. “This dispute does not concern you. Get out of the way, Valentine.”
“Better that I don’t, until your fury has subsided.”
Zalzan Gibor’s eyes blazed. He advanced until he was no more than a few feet from Valentine, until Valentine could smell the anger-sharpened scent of the rough-thatched Skandar. Zalzan Gibor still seethed. It might be, Valentine thought, that he will throw both of us against the wall. Erfon Gibor and Gibor Haem stared from the side: possibly they had never seen their brother defied before. There was silence a long moment. Zalzan Gibor’s hands twitched convulsively, but he remained where he was.
At length he said, “This Vroon is the wizard Autifon Deliamber, whom I hire to show me the inland roads and to guard me against the deceits of the Shapeshifters. All this week he has enjoyed a holiday at my expense in Pick ruid; now it is time to leave and he tells me to find another guide, that he has lost interest in traveling from village ta village. Is this your sense of how contracts are kept, wizard?”
The Vroon answered, “I am old and weary and my sorceries grow stale, and sometimes I think I start to forget the road. But if you still wish it, I’ll accompany you as before, Zalzan Gibor.”
The Skandar looked astounded.
“What?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Autifon Deliamber blandly, letting go his fearful clutch of Valentine’s legs and stepping out into view. The Vroon coiled and opened his many rubbery boneless arms, as if a dread tension were being discharged from them, and peered boldly up at the enormous Skandar. “I will keep to my contract,” he declared.
Bewilderedly Zalzan Gibor said, “For an hour and a half you’ve been swearing you’ll remain here in Pidruid, ignoring all my entreaties and even ignoring my threats, driving me into such rage that I was ready to smash you to pulp, to my own grievous harm as well as yours, for dead sorcerers give poor service and the jails of Pidruid are not easy to flee, and still you were stubborn, still you denied the contract and told me to make shift elsewhere for a guide. And now at a moment’s notice you retract all that?”
“I do.”
“Will you have the grace to tell me why?”
“No reason,” said the Vroon, “except perhaps that this young man pleases me, that I admire his courage and his kindness and the warmth of his soul, and because he goes with you I will go with you again, for his sake and no other reason. Does that gratify your curiosity, Zalzan Gibor?”
