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

by Robert Silverberg

  Wraithlike she drifted past him, and disappeared between two broken columns inscribed with scenes of the deeds of the great Coronals, and was gone.

  “Mother?” he called.

  The dream was over. Valentine struggled to make her return, but could not. He awakened and lay peering into the darkness, seeing that veiled figure once more and searching for meaning. She hadn’t recognized him. Was he so effectively transformed that not even his own mother could perceive who lay hidden in this body? Or had he never been her son, so that there was no reason for her to know him? He lacked answers. If the soul of dark-haired Lord Valentine was embedded in the body of fair-haired Valentine, the Lady of the Isle in his dream had given no sign of it, and he was as far from understanding as he had been when he closed his eyes.

  What follies I pursue, he thought. What implausible speculations, what madnesses!

  He eased himself back into sleep.

  And almost at once, so it seemed, a hand touched his shoulder and someone rocked him until he came reluctantly into wakefulness. Carabella.

  “Two hours after midnight,” she told him. “Zalzan Kavol wants us down by the wagon in half an hour. Did you dream?”

  “Inconclusively. And you?”

  “I remained awake,” she answered. “It seemed safest. Some nights one prefers not to dream.” She said timidly, as he began to dress, “Will I share your room again, Valentine?”

  “Would you like to?”

  “I have given oath to act with you as I acted before—before I knew— Oh, Valentine, I was so frightened! But yes. Yes, let’s be companions again, and even lovers. Tomorrow night!”

  “What if I am Coronal?”

  “Please. Don’t ask such questions.”

  “What if I am?”

  “You’ve ordered me to call you Valentine and to regard you as Valentine. This I’ll do, if you’ll let me.”

  “Do you believe I’m Coronal?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “It no longer frightens you?”

  “A little. Just a little. You still seem human to me.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve had a day to get used to things. And I’m under an oath. I must think of you as Valentine. I swore by the Powers to that.” She grinned impishly. “I swore an oath to the Coronal that I would pretend you are not Coronal, and so I must be true to my pledge, and treat you casually, and call you Valentine, and show no fear of you, and behave as though nothing has changed. And so I can share your bed tomorrow night?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Valentine.”

  He pulled her lightly to him. “I thank you for overcoming your fear. I love you, Carabella.”

  “Zalzan Kavol will be angry if we’re late,” she said.

  2

  The Perpetual Circus was housed in a structure altogether opposite from those most typical of Dulorn: a giant flat unadorned drum of a building, perfectly circular and no more than ninety feet high, that stood by itself on a huge tract of open land on the eastern perimeter of the city. Within, a great central space provided an awesome setting for the stage, and around it ran the seating ring, tier upon tier in concentric circles rising to the roof.

  The place could hold thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Valentine was startled to see how nearly full it was, here at what was for him the middle of the night. Looking outward into the audience was difficult, for the stage-lights were in his eyes, but he was able to perceive enormous numbers of people sitting or sprawling in their seats. Nearly all were Ghayrogs, though he caught sight of the occasional Hjort or Vroon or human making a late night of it. There were no places on Majipoor entirely populated by one race—ancient decrees of the government, going back to the earliest days of heavy non-human settlement, forbade such concentrations except on the Metamorph reservation—but the Ghayrogs were a particularly clannish lot, and tended to cluster together in and around Dulorn up to the legal maximum. Though warm-blooded and mammalian, they had certain reptilian traits that made them unlovable to most other races: quick-flicking forked red tongues, grayish scaly skin of a thick, polished consistency, cold green unblinking eyes. Their hair had a medusoid quality, black succulent strands that coiled and writhed unsettlingly, and their odor, both sweet and acrid at once, was not charming to non-Ghayrog nostrils.

  Valentine’s mood was subdued as he moved out with the troupe onto the stage. The hour was all wrong: his body-cycles were at low ebb, and though he had had enough sleep, he had no enthusiasm for being awake just now. Once again he carried the burden of a difficult dream. That rejection by the Lady, that inability to make contact with her, what did it signify? When he was only Valentine the juggler, significance was insignificant to him: each day had a path of its own, and he had no worries about larger patterns, only to increase the skill of hand and eye from one day to the next. But now that these ambiguous and disturbing revelations had been visited upon him he was forced to consider dreary long-range matters of purpose and destiny and the route on which he was bound. He had no liking for that. Already he tasted a keen nostalgic sorrow for the good old times of the week before last, when he had wandered busy Pidruid in happy aimlessness.

  The demands of his art quickly lifted him out of this brooding. There was no time, under the glare of the spotlights, to think of anything except the work of performing.

  The stage was colossal, and many things were happening on it at once. Vroon magicians were doing a routine involving floating colored lights and bursts of green and red smoke; an animal-trainer just beyond had a dozen fat serpents standing on their tails; a dazzling group of dancers with grotesquely attenuated bodies sprayed in many-faceted silver glowstuff did austere leaps and carries; several small orchestras in widely separated regions played the tinny and tootling woodwind musk beloved of the Ghayrogs; there was a one-finger acrobat, a high-wire woman, a levitator, a trio of glassblowers engaged in fashioning a cage for themselves, an eel-eater, and a platoon of berserk clowns, along with much more beyond Valentine’s range of vision. The audience, slouching and lounging out there in the half-darkness, had an easy time watching all this, for, Valentine realized, the giant stage was in gentle motion, turning slowly on hidden bearings, and in the course of an hour or two would make a complete circuit, presenting each group of performers in turn to every part of the auditorium. “It all floats on a pool of quicksilver,” Sleet whispered. “You could buy three provinces with the value of the metal.”

  With so much competition for the eyes of the onlookers, the jugglers had brought forth some of their finest effects, which meant that the novice Valentine was largely excluded, left to toss clubs to himself and occasionally to feed knives or torches to the others. Carabella was dancing atop a silver globe two feet in diameter that rolled in irregular circles as she moved: she juggled five spheres that glowed with brilliant green light. Sleet had mounted stilts, and rose even taller than the Skandars, a tiny figure far above everyone, coolly flipping from hand to hand three huge red-and-black-speckled eggs of the moleeka-hen, that he had bought at market that evening. If he dropped an egg from so great a height, the splash would be conspicuous and the humiliation enormous, but never since Valentine had known him had Sleet dropped anything, and he dropped no eggs tonight. As for the six Skandars, they had arranged themselves in a rigid star-pattern, standing with their backs to one another, and were juggling flaming torches. At carefully coordinated moments each would hurl a torch backward over his outer shoulder to his brother at the opposite side of the star. The interchanges were made with wondrous precision, the trajectories of the flying torches were flawlessly timed to create splendid crisscrossing patterns of light, and not a hair on any Skandar’s hide was scorched as they casually snatched from the air the firebrands that came hurtling past them from their unseen partners.

  Round and round the stage they went, performing in stints of half an hour at a stretch, with five minutes to relax in the central well just below the stage, where hundreds of other off-
duty artists gathered. Valentine longed to be doing something more challenging than his own little elementary juggle, but Zalzan Kavol had forbidden it: he was not yet ready, the Skandar said, though he was doing excellently well for a novice.

  Morning came before the troupe was allowed to leave the stage. Payment here was by the hour, and hiring was governed by silent response-meters beneath the seats of the audience, monitored by cold-eyed Ghayrogs in a booth in the well. Some performers lasted only a few minutes before universal boredom or disdain banished them, but Zalzan Kavol and his company, who had been guaranteed two hours of work, remained on stage for four. They would have been kept for a fifth if Zalzan Kavol had not been dissuaded by his brothers, who gathered around him for a brief and intense argument.

  “His greed,” Carabella said quietly, “will lead him to embarrass himself yet. How long does he think people can throw those torches around before someone slips up? Even Skandars get tired eventually.”

  “Not Zalzan Kavol, from the looks of it,” Valentine said.

  “He may be a juggling machine, yes, but his brothers are mortal. Rovorn’s timing is starting to get ragged. I’m glad they had the courage to make a stand.” She smiled. “And I was getting pretty tired too.”

  So successfully were the jugglers received in Dulorn that they were hired for four additional days. Zalzan Kavol was elated—the Ghayrogs gave their entertainers high wages—and declared a five-crown bonus for everyone.

  All well and good, Valentine thought. But he had no wish to settle in indefinitely among the Ghayrogs. After the second day, restlessness began to make him chafe.

  “You wish to be moving on,” Deliamber said—a statement, not a question.

  Valentine nodded. “I begin to glimpse the shape of the road ahead of me.”

  “To the Isle?”

  “Why do you bother speaking with people,” Valentine said lightly, “if you see everything within their minds?”

  “I did no mind-peeking this time. Your next move is obvious enough.”

  “Go to the Lady, yes. Who else can truly tell me who I am?”

  “You still have doubts,” Deliamber said.

  “I have no evidence other than dreams.”

  “Which speak powerful truths.”

  “Yes,” Valentine said, “but dreams can be parables, dreams can be metaphors, dreams can be fantasies. It’s folly to speak them literally without confirmation. And the Lady can give confirmation, or so I hope. How far is it to the Isle, wizard?”

  Deliamber briefly closed his large golden eyes.

  “Thousands of miles,” he said. “We are now perhaps a fifth of the way across Zimroel. You must make your way eastward through Khyntor or Velathys, and around the territory of the Metamorphs, and then perhaps by riverboat via Ni-moya to Piliplok, where the pilgrim-ships leave for the Isle.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “To reach Piliplok? At our present pace, about fifty years. Wandering with these jugglers, stopping here and there for a week at a time—”

  “What if I left the troupe and went on my own?”

  “Six months, possibly. The river journey is swift. The overland section takes much longer. If we had airships as they do on other worlds it would be a matter of a day or two to Piliplok, but of course we do without many devices on Majipoor that other people enjoy.”

  “Six months?” Valentine frowned. “And the cost, if I hired a vehicle and a guide?”

  “Perhaps twenty royals. You’ll juggle a long time to earn that much.”

  “When I get to Piliplok,” Valentine said, “what then?”

  “You book passage to the Isle. The voyage is a matter of weeks. When you reach the Isle you take lodging on the lowest terrace and begin the ascent.”

  “The ascent?”

  “A course of prayer, purification, and initiation. You move upward from terrace to terrace until you reach the Terrace of Adoration, which is the threshold to Inner Temple. You know nothing of any of this?”

  “My mind, Deliamber, has been meddled with.”

  “Of course.”

  “At Inner Temple, then?”

  “You are now an initiate. You serve the Lady as an acolyte, and if you seek an audience with her, you undergo special rites and await the summoning dream.”

  Uneasily Valentine said, “How long does this entire process take, the terraces, the initiation, the service as acolyte, the summoning dream?”

  “It varies. Five years, sometimes. Ten. Forever, conceivably. The Lady has no time for each and every pilgrim.”

  “And there’s no more direct way of gaining audience?”

  Deliamber uttered the thick coughing sound that was his laugh. “What? Knock on the temple door, cry out that you are her changeling son, demand entry?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” the Vroon said, “the outer terraces of the Isle are designed as filters to keep such things from happening. There are no easy channels of communication to the Lady, and deliberately so. It would take you years.”

  “I’d find a way.” Valentine stared levelly at the little wizard. “I could reach her mind, if I were on the Isle. I could cry out to her, I could persuade her to summon me. Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “With your assistance it could be done.”

  “I feared that was coming,” said Deliamber dryly.

  “You have some skill at making sendings. We could reach, if not the Lady herself, then those close to her. Step by step, drawing ourselves closer to her, cutting short the interminable process on the terraces—”

  “It could be done, possibly,” Deliamber said. “Do you believe I’m minded to make the pilgrimage with you, though?”

  Valentine regarded the Vroon in silence for a long time.

  “I’m certain of it,” he said finally. “You play at reluctance, but you’ve engineered my every motive to impel me toward the Isle. With you at my side. Am I right? Eh, Deliamber? You’re more eager to have me get there than I am myself.”

  “Ah,” the sorcerer said. “It comes out now!”

  “Am I right?”

  “If you resolve to go to the Isle, Valentine, I will be at your side. But are you resolved?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Intermittent resolutions lack potency,” said Deliamber.

  “Thousands of miles. Years of waiting. Toil and intrigue. Why do I want to do this, Deliamber?”

  “Because you are Coronal, and must be again.”

  “The first may be true, though I have mighty doubts of it. The second is open to question.”

  Deliamber’s look was crafty. “You prefer to live under the rule of a usurper?”

  “What’s the Coronal and his rule to me? He’s half a world away on Castle Mount and I’m a wandering juggler.” Valentine extended his fingers and stared at them as though he had never seen his hands before. “I could spare myself much effort if I remained with Zalzan Kavol and let the other, whoever he may be, keep the throne. Suppose he’s a wise and just usurper? Where’s the benefit for Majipoor, if I do all this work merely to put myself back in his place? Oh, Deliamber, Deliamber, do I sound like a king at all, when I say these things? Where’s my lust for power? How can I ever have been a ruler, when I so obviously don’t care about what’s happened?”

  “We’ve spoken of this before. You have been tampered with, my lord. Your spirit as well as your face has been changed.”

  “Even so. My royal nature, if ever I had one, is altogether gone from me. That lust for power—”

  “Twice you’ve used the phrase,” Deliamber said. “Lust has nothing to do with it. A true king doesn’t lust for power: responsibility lusts for him. And takes him, and possesses him. This Coronal is new, he has done little yet but make the grand processional, and already the people grumble at his early decrees. And you ask if he will be wise and just? How can any usurper be just? He is a criminal, Valentine, and he rules already with a criminal’s guilty fears eating at his dr
eams, and as time goes on those fears will poison him and he will be a tyrant. Can you doubt that? He will remove anyone who threatens him—will kill, even, if need be. The poison that courses in his veins will enter the life of the planet itself, will affect every citizen. And you, sitting here looking at your fingers, do you see no responsibility? How can you talk of sparing yourself much effort? As if it hardly matters who is the king. It matters very much who is the king, my lord, and you were chosen and trained for it, and not by lottery. Or do you believe anyone can become Coronal?”

  “I do. By random stroke of fate.”

  Deliamber laughed harshly. “Possibly that was true nine thousand years ago. There is a dynasty, my lord.”

  “An adoptive dynasty?”

  “Precisely. Since the time of Lord Arioc, and maybe even earlier. Coronals have been chosen from among a small group of families, no more than a hundred clans, all of them dwellers on Castle Mount and close participants in the government. The next Coronal is already in training, though only he and a few advisers know who he is, and two or three replacements for him must also have been chosen. But now the line is broken, now an intruder has pushed his way in. Nothing but evil can come of that.”

  “What if the usurper is simply the heir-in-waiting, who grew tired of waiting?”

  “No,” said Deliamber. “Inconceivable. No one deemed qualified to be Coronal would overthrow a lawfully consecrated prince. Besides, why the mummery of pretending to be Lord Valentine, if he is another?”

  “I grant you that.”

  “Grant me also this: that the person atop Castle Mount now has neither right nor qualification for being there, and must be cast down, and you are the only one who can do it.”

  Valentine sighed. “You ask a great deal.”

  “History asks a great deal,” said Deliamber. “History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason. And the forces of order and creation and reason have been focused always in a single leader, a king, if you will, or a president, a chairman, a grand minister, a generalissimo, use whatever word you wish, a monarch by some name or other. Here it is the Coronal, or more accurately the Coronal ruling as the voice of the Pontifex who was once Coronal, and it matters, my lord, it matters very much, who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal.”