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

by Robert Silverberg

  “My lord!” he cried. “Will you tolerate such irreverent—”

  “Not so loud on the my lord,” Valentine said crisply. “Irreverent, you say? What are you talking about?”

  “No respect for a terrible tragedy! No respect for a fallen Coronal! No respect for—”

  “Zalzan Kavol!” Valentine said slyly. “Are you such a lover of respectability, then?”

  “I know what is right and what is wrong, my lord. To mock the death of Lord Malibor is—”

  “Be more easy, my friend,” Valentine said gently, putting his hand on one of the Skandar’s gigantic forearms. “Where Lord Malibor has gone, he is far beyond matters of respect or disrespect. And I thought the song was a delight. If I take no offense, Zalzan Kavol, why should you?”

  But Zalzan Kavol continued to grumble and bluster. “If I may say it, my lord, you may not yet be returned to a full sense of the rightness of things. If I were you, I would go to those sailors now and order them never to sing such a thing again in your presence.”

  “In my presence?” Valentine said, with a broad grin. “Why should they care dragon-spittle for my presence? Who am I but a passenger, barely tolerated at all? If I said any such thing, I’d be over the rail in a minute, and dragon-feed myself the next. Eh? Think about it, Zalzan Kavol! And calm yourself, fellow. It’s only a silly sailor-song.”

  “Nevertheless,” the Skandar muttered, walking stiffly away.

  Carabella giggled. “He takes himself so seriously.”

  Valentine began to hum, then to sing:

  All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,

  Of this—

  Of this sad tale?—

  Of this sad tale take heed!

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Love, will you do me a service? When those men are through with their work, draw one of them aside—the red-bearded one, I think, with the deep bass voice—and have him teach you the words. And then teach them to me. And I can sing it to Zalzan Kavol to make him smile, eh? How does it go? Let’s see—”

  “I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,

  And came across the sea.

  Twelve miles long and three miles wide

  And two miles deep was he—

  A week or thereabouts passed before they sighted dragons again, and in that time not only Carabella and Valentine learned the ditty, but Lisamon Hultin as well, who took pleasure in bellowing it across the decks in her raucous baritone. But Zalzan Kavol continued to growl and snort whenever he heard it.

  The second school of dragons was much larger than the first, and Gorzval allowed the taking of some two dozen small ones, one midsized, and one titan at least a hundred and thirty feet long. That kept all hands busy for the next few days. The deck ran purple with dragons’ blood, and bones and wings were stacked all over the ship as the crew labored to get everything down to storable size. At the captain’s table delicacies were offered, from the most mysterious inner parts of the creature, and Gorzval, ever more expansive, brought forth casks of fine wines, quite unsuspected from someone who had been at the edge of bankruptcy. “Piliplok golden,” he said, pouring with a lavish hand. “I have saved this wine for some special occasion, and doubtless this is it. You have brought us excellent luck.”

  “Your fellow captains will not be joyed to hear that,” Valentine said. “We might easily have sailed with them, if they had only known how charmed we were.”

  “Their loss, our gain. To your pilgrimage, my friends!” cried the Skandar captain.

  They were moving now through ever more balmy waters. The hot wind out of Suvrael relented here at the edge of the tropics, and a kinder, moister breeze came to them out of the southwest, from the distant Stoienzar Peninsula of Alhanroel. The water was a deep green hue, sea-birds were numerous, algae grew so thick in places that navigation was sometimes impeded, and brightly colored fish could be seen darting just below the surface—the prey of the dragons, who were flesh-eaters and swam openmouthed through swarms of lesser sea-creatures. The Rodamaunt Archipelago now lay not far away, Gorzval proposed to complete his haul here: the Brangalyn had room for another few large dragons, two more of middle size, and perhaps forty of the small, and then he would drop his passengers and head for Piliplok to market his catch.

  “Dragons ho!” came the lookout’s cry.

  This was the greatest school yet, hundreds of them, spiny humps rising above the water everywhere. For two days the Brangalyn moved among them, slaughtering at will. On the horizon other ships could be seen, but they were far off, for strict rules governed impinging on hunting territory.

  Gorzval seemed to glow with the success of his voyage. He himself took frequent turns in the boat-crews, which Valentine gathered was unusual, and once he even made his way to the cupola to wield a harpoon. The ship now was settling low to the waterline with the weight of dragon-flesh.

  On the third day dragons were still close about them, undismayed by the carnage and unwilling to scatter. “One more big one,” Gorzval vowed, “and then we make for the islands.”

  He selected an eighty-footer for the final target.

  Valentine had grown bored, and more than bored, with the butchery, and as the harpooner sent his third shaft into the prey he turned away, and walked to the far side of the deck. There he found Sleet, and they stood by the rail, peering off to the east.

  “Do you think we can see the Archipelago from here?” Valentine asked. “I long for solid land again, and an end to the stink of dragon-blood in my nostrils.”

  “My eyes are keen, my lord, but the islands are two days’ sailing from here, and I think even my vision has limits. But—” Sleet gasped. “My lord—”

  “What is it?”

  “An island comes swimming toward us, my lord!”

  Valentine stared, but with difficulty at first: it was morning and a brilliant fiery glare lit the surface of the sea. But Sleet took Valentine’s hand and pointed with it, and then Valentine saw. A ridged dragon-spine broke the water, a spine that went on and on and on, and below it a vast and implausible bulk was dimly visible.

  “Lord Kinniken’s dragon!” Valentine said in a choked voice. “And it comes straight at us!”

  4

  Kinniken’s it might be, or more likely some other not nearly so great, but it was great enough, larger than the Brangalyn, and it was bearing down on them steadily and unhesitatingly—either an avenging angel or else an unthinking force, there was no knowing that, but its mass was unarguable.

  “Where is Gorzval?” Sleet blurted. “Weapons—guns—?”

  Valentine laughed. “As easily stop a rockslide with a harpoon, Sleet. Are you a good swimmer?”

  Most of the hunters were preoccupied with their catch. But some had looked the other way now, and there was frantic activity on deck. The harpooner had whirled round and stood outlined against the sky, weapons in every hand. Others had mounted the adjoining cupolas. Valentine, searching for Carabella and Deliamber and the others, caught sight of Gorzval rushing madly toward the helm; the Skandar’s face was livid and his eyes were bugging, and he looked like one who stood in the presence of the ministers of death.

  “Lower the boats!” someone screamed. Winches turned. Figures ran about wildly. One, a Hjort black-cheeked with fear, shook a fist at Valentine and caught him roughly by the arm, muttering, “You brought this on us! You should never have been allowed on board, any of you!”

  Lisamon Hultin appeared from somewhere and swept the Hjort aside like so much chaff. Then she flung her powerful arms around Valentine as if to protect him from any harm that might come.

  “The Hjort was right, you know,” said Valentine calmly. “We are an ill-omened bunch. First Zalzan Kavol loses his wagon, and now poor Gorzval loses—”

  There was a ghastly impact as the onrushing dragon crashed broadside into the Brangalyn.

  The ship heeled over as though it had been pushed by a giant’s hand, then rolled dizzyingly back the other way. An awful shudder shook its timbers. A sec
ondary impact came—the wings hitting the hull, the thrashing flukes?—and then another, and the Brangalyn bobbed like a cork. “We’re stove in!” a desperate voice cried. Things rolled free on the deck, a giant rendering cauldron breaking its moorings and tumbling over three hapless crewmen, a case of boning-axes ripping loose and skidding over the side. As the ship continued to sway and lurch, Valentine caught a glimpse of the great dragon on the far side, where the recent catch still hung, unbalancing everything; and the monster swung around and headed in for another attack. There could be no doubt now of the purposefulness of its onslaught.

  The dragon struck, shoulder-side on; the Brangalyn rocked wildly; Valentine grunted as Lisamon Hultin’s grip became an almost crushing embrace. He had no idea where any of the others might be, nor whether they would survive. Clearly the ship was doomed. Already it was listing badly as water poured into the hold. The tail of the dragon rose nearly to deck-level and struck again. Everything dissolved into chaos. Valentine felt himself flying; he soared gracefully, he dipped and bobbed, he plunged with elegance and skill toward the water.

  He landed in something much like a whirlpool and was drawn down into the terrible turbulent spin.

  As he went under Valentine could not help but hear the ballad of Lord Malibor ringing in his mind. In truth that Coronal had taken a fancy to dragon-hunting some ten years back, and had gone out in what was said to be the finest dragon-ship in Piliplok, and the ship had been lost with all hands. No one knew what had happened, but—so it came out of Valentine’s spotty recollections—the government had spoken of a sudden storm. More likely, he thought, it had been this killer-beast, this avenger of dragonkind.

  Twelve miles long and three miles wide

  And two miles deep was he—

  And now a second Coronal, successor but one to Malibor, would meet the same fate. Valentine was oddly unmoved by that. He had thought himself dying in the rapids of the Steiche, and had survived that; here, with a hundred miles of sea between him and any sort of safety, and a rampaging monster lashing about close at hand, he was even more surely doomed, but there was no use bemoaning it. The Divine had clearly withdrawn its favor from him. What grieved him was that others whom he loved would die with him, merely because they had been loyal, because they had pledged themselves to follow him on his journey to the Isle, because they had tied themselves to a luckless Coronal and a luckless dragon-captain and now must share their evil destinies.

  He was sucked deep into the heart of the ocean and ceased to ponder the tides of luck. He struggled for breath, coughed, choked, spat out water and swallowed more. His head pounded mercilessly. Carabella, he thought, and darkness engulfed him.

  Valentine had never, since awakening out of his broken past to find himself near Pidruid, given much thought to a philosophy of death. Life held challenges enough for him. He recalled vaguely what he had been taught in boyhood, that all souls return to the Divine Source at their last moment when the release of life-energy comes, and travel over the Bridge of Farewells, the bridge that is the prime responsibility of the Pontifex. But whether there might be truth in that, whether there was a world beyond, and if so of what sort, Valentine had never paused to consider. Now, though, he returned to consciousness in a place so strange that it surpassed the imaginings of even the most fertile of thinkers.

  Was this the afterlife? It was a giant chamber, a great silent room with thick moist pink walls and a roof that was in places high and domed, supported by mighty pillars, and in other places drooped until it nearly touched the floor. In that roof were mounted huge glowing hemispheres that emitted a faint blue light, as if by phosphorescence. The air in here was rank and steamy, and had a sharp, bitter flavor, unpleasant and stifling. Valentine lay on his side against a wet slippery surface, rough to the touch, deeply corrugated, quivering with constant deep palpitations and tremors. He put the flat of his hand to it and felt a kind of convulsion deep within. The texture of the ground was like nothing he had known before, and those tiny but perceptible motions within it made him wonder if what he had entered was not the world after death but merely some grotesque hallucination.

  Valentine got unsteadily to his feet. His clothing was soaked, he had lost one boot somewhere, his lips burned with the taste of salt, his lungs seemed full of water, and he felt shaky and dazed; furthermore it was hard to keep upright on this unendingly trembling surface. Looking about, he saw by the dim pale luminosity a kind of vegetation, pliant whip-shaped growths, thick and fleshy and leafless, sprouting from the ground. They too writhed with inner animation. Making his way between two lofty pillars and through an area where ceiling and floor almost met, he caught sight of what seemed to be a pond of some greenish fluid. Beyond that he was unable to see in the dimness.

  He walked toward the pond and perceived something exceedingly odd in it: hundreds of brightly colored fish, of the kind that he had seen flitting about in the water before the day’s hunt had begun. They were not swimming now. They were dead and decaying, flesh stripping away from bones, and below them in the pool was a carpet of similar bones, many feet thick.

  Suddenly there was a sound as of the roaring of the wind behind him. Valentine turned. The walls of the chamber were in motion, pulling back, the drooping places in the ceiling retracting to create a vast open space; and a torrent of water came rushing toward him, as high as his hips. He barely had time to reach one of the ceiling-pillars and fling his arms tight about it; then the inrushing of water sluiced about him with tremendous force. He held on. It seemed that half the Inner Sea was pouring past him, and for a moment he thought he would lose his grip, but then the flow subsided and the water drained away through slits that materialized abruptly in the floor—leaving in its wake scores of stranded fish. The floor convulsed; the fleshy whips swept the desperate flopping fish across the floor to the greenish pool; and once they entered it they quickly ceased to move.

  Suddenly Valentine understood.

  I am not dead, he knew, nor is this any place of afterlife. I am within the belly of the dragon.

  He began to laugh.

  Valentine threw back his head and let giant guffaws pour from him. What other response was fitting? To cry? To curse? The vast beast had gobbled him whole at a gulp, had sucked in the Coronal of Majipoor as heedlessly as it might a minnow. But he was too big to be propelled into that digestive pond down there, so here he was, camped on the floor of the dragon’s maw, in this cathedral of an alimentary canal. What now? Hold court for the fishes? Dispense justice among them as they came sweeping in? Settle down here and spend the rest of his days dining on raw fish stolen from the monster’s catch?

  It was high comedy, Valentine thought.

  But dark tragedy as well, for Sleet and Carabella and young Shanamir and all the others, drawn down to death in the wreck of the Brangalyn, victims of their own sympathies and of his awesomely bad luck. For them he felt only anguish. Carabella’s lilting voice silenced forever, and Sleet’s miraculous skills of hand and eye forever lost, and the rough-souled Skandars no longer to fill the air with whirling multitudes of knives and sickles and torches, and Shanamir cut off before he had fairly begun his life—

  Valentine could not bear thinking about them.

  For himself, though, there was only cosmic amusement at this absurd plight. To take his mind from grief and pain and loss he laughed again, and stretched his arms wide to the distant walls of the strange room. “Lord Valentine’s Castle, this is!” he cried. “The throne-room! I invite you all to dine with me in the grand feasting-hall!”

  Out of the murky distance a booming voice called, “By my gut, I accept that invitation!”

  Valentine was astounded beyond all measure.

  “Lisamon?”

  “No, it’s the Pontifex Tyeveras and his cross-eyed uncle! Is that you, Valentine?”

  “Yes! Where are you?”

  “In the gizzard of this stinking dragon! Where are you?”

  “Not far from you! But I can’t see you!
”

  “Sing,” she called. “Stay where you are and sing, and keep singing! I’ll try to reach you!”

  Valentine began, in the loudest voice he could muster:

  Lord Malibor was fine and bold

  And loved the heaving sea—

  Again the roaring sound came; again the great creature’s gullet opened to admit a cascade of seawater and a horde of fish; again Valentine clung to a pillar as the influx hit him.

  “Oh—by the Divine’s toes,” Lisamon cried. “Hang on, Valentine, hang on!”

  He hung on until the force was spent, and slumped against the pillar, soaked, panting. Somewhere in the distance the giantess called to him, and he called back. Her voice grew nearer. She urged him to keep singing, and he did:

  Lord Malibor stood at the helm

  And faced the heaving wave.

  And sailed in quest of the dragon free—

  He heard her occasionally bawling a snatch of the ballad herself, with amiably bawdy embellishments, as she approached through the intricacies of the dragon’s interior, and then he looked up and saw by the faint luminous light her enormous form looming above him. He smiled at her. She smiled, and laughed, and he laughed with her, and they clasped one another in a wet, slippery embrace.

  But the sight of one who had survived put him in mind again of those who surely had not, and plunged him once more into grief and shame. He turned away, biting at his lip.

  “My lord?” she said puzzledly.

  “Only we two remain, Lisamon.”

  “Yes, and praises be for that!”

  “But the others—they’d live now, if they hadn’t been so stupid as to go chasing across the world with me—”

  She caught him by the arm. “My lord, will mourning them bring them back to life, if dead they be?”

  “I know all that. But—”

  “We are safe. If we have lost our friends, my lord, that’s cause for sorrow indeed, but not for guilt. They followed you of their own free choice, eh, my lord? And if their time has come, well, it is because their time has come, and how could that have been otherwise? Will you give up this grief, my lord, and rejoice that we are safe?”