Collected Short Fiction, page 1022
“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 impostor, 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 don’t believe that, do 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 Gibor 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 Gibor looked altogether dumbfounded. “How did you manage to do that?”
With a cheerful smile Valentine said “It would be tedious to explain, I think.”
8.
The pace of the journey now accelerated, for there would be no reason to stop again until the land of the Metamorphs. 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 Mazadone was more heavily populated than most on Zimroel, especially in the central part of the continent. It was a place where commercial pursuits kept many millions employed, for Mazadone was 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. In these long days of travel 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 a 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 were ordinarily allowed to 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 Gibor, 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.
And not all that is seen in dreams has the form of metaphor and parable. 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 goldenhaired, 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 can’t be sure. 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.”
Valentine nodded distantly. “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 northcentral 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 that abounded 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 low 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 great 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, and 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, bridges 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, and its shores were occupied by hundreds of wealthy cities and many 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.
That 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. As he approached it, 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, and a being of sinister and forbidding aspect confronted him. This creature was of alien shape, but belonged to none of the nonhuman 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 that had not been evident before. 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, without any awareness that his surroundings were changing; and 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 that unfathomable anger.
“Behold the Pontifex,” the creature said.
And Valentine looked beyond it into a darkened chamber and saw the imperial sovereign of Majipoor seated upon a throne, clad in robes of black and scarlet and wearing the royal tiara, and the Pontifex of Majipoor was a monster with many arms and many legs, and the face of a man but the wings of a dragon, and he sat shrieking and roaring upon the throne like a madman. A terrible whistling sound came from his lips, and the smell of the Pontifex was a frightful stink, and the black leathery wings flailed the air with fierce intensity, buffeting Valentine with cold gales. “Your majesty,” Valentine said, and bowed, and said, again, “Your majesty.”
“Your lordship,” replied the Pontifex. And laughed, and reached for Valentine and tugged him forward, and then Valentine was on the throne and the Pontifex, laughing insanely, was fleeing up the brightly lit corridors, running and flapping wings and raving and shrieking, until he was lost from sight.
Valentine woke, wet with perspiration, in Carabella’s arms. She showed a look of deep concern bordering on fear, as if the terrors of his dream had been only too obvious to her, and she held him a moment, saying nothing, until he had had a chance to comprehend the fact that he was awake. Tenderly she stroked his cheeks. “You cried out three times,” she told him.
“There are occasions,” he said after gulping a little wine from a flask beside the bed, “when it seems more wearing to sleep than to remain awake. My dreams are hard work, Carabella.”
“There’s much in your soul that seeks to express itself, my lord.”
“It expresses itself in a very strenuous way,” Valentine said and nestled down against her breasts. “If dreams are the source of wisdom, I pray to grow no wiser before dawn.”
9.
In Khyntor, Zalzan Gibor booked passage for the troupe aboard a river-boat bound toward Ni-moya and Piliplok. They would be journeying only a short way down the river, though, to the minor city of Verf, gateway to the territory of the metamorphs.
Valentine felt regret at the thought of having to leave the riverboat at Verf, when he could easily, for another ten or fifteen royals, sail all the way to Piliplok and take ship for the Isle of Sleep. That, after all, and not the Shapeshifter reservation, was his most urgent immediate destination: the Isle of the Lady, where perhaps he might find confirmation of the visions that tormented him. But that was not to be, just yet. He was bound by loyalty to his companions to take the route that Zalzan Gibor chose; and Zalzan Gibor had chosen to go to Ilirivoyne.
Destiny, Valentine thought, could not be rushed. Thus far, things moved with deliberate speed but toward some definite, if not always understandable, goal. He was no longer the cheerful and simple idler of Pidruid, and, although he had no sure knowledge of what it was he was becoming, he had a definite sense of inner transition, of boundaries passed and not to be recrossed. He saw himself as an actor in some vast and bewildering drama, the climactic scenes of which were still far away in space and time.
The riverboat, first such vessel that Valentine had beheld in his present awareness, was a grotesque and fanciful structure, but not without a beauty of sorts. Ocean-going ships such as had been in port at Pidruid were designed for grace and sturdiness, since they would face journeys of thousands of miles between harbors; but the river-boat, a short-haul vessel, was squat and broad-beamed, more of a floating platform than a ship, and as if to compensate for the inelegance of its design, its builders had festooned it with ornament—a great soaring bridge topped with triple figureheads painted in brilliant reds and yellows, an enormous central courtyard almost like a village plaza, with statuary and pavilions and game parlors, and, at the stem, an upswept superstructure of many levels in which the passengers were housed. Belowdecks were cargo holds, steerage quarters for the less fortunate, dining halls, and cabins for the crew, as well as the engine room, from which two gigantic smokestacks sprouted that came curving up the sides of the hull and rose skyward like the horns of a demon. The entire frame of the ship was of wood, metal being too scarce on Majipoor for such large-scale enterprises and stone being generally deemed undesirable for maritime use; and the carpenters had exerted their imaginations over every square foot of the surface, decorating it with scrollwork, dadoes, outjutting joists, and similar flourishes of a hundred kinds.
Zalzan Gibor’s wagon was secured by chocks to the deck, amid fifty or seventy other vehicles not nearly so grand. The jugglers had dormitory accommodations below, since the Skandar, ever thrifty, did not care to buy cabin tickets. Departure was scheduled for early on a Twoday afternoon; they would be in Verf by Fourday, and comfort was a small consideration in such a short voyage.
The riverboat seemed a vast and teeming microcosm all in itself. As they waited for sailing, Valentine and Deliamber and Carabella strolled the deck, which was thronged with citizens of many districts and of all the races of Majipoor. Valentine saw frontiersmen from the mountains beyond Khyntor, Ghayrogs in the finery affected in Dulorn, people of the humid southlands in cool white linens, travelers in sumptuous robes of crimson and green which Carabella said were typical of western Alhanroel, and many others. The ubiquitous Liimen sold their ubiquitous grilled sausages; officious Hjorts, fond of taking minor administrative posts, strutted about in uniforms of the riverboat line, giving information and instructions to those who asked and to many who did not; a Su-Suheris family in diaphanous green robes, conspicuous because of their unlikely doubleheaded bodies and aloof, imperious mien, drifted like emisaries from the world of dreams through the crowds, who gave way in automatic deference. And there was one small group of Metamorphs on deck that afternoon.
