“Yes?”
“The Coronal Lord Guadeloom, before he took to his chambers to begin the task of comprehending these transformations, appointed me his chancellor. He will leave next week for Castle Mount. And I must be at his side, naturally.”
“How splendid for you,” said Silimoor coolly.
“I ask you therefore to join me there, to share my life at the Castle,” he said as measuredly as he could.
Her dazzling turquoise eyes stared frostily into his.
“I am native to the Labyrinth,” she answered. “I love dearly to dwell in its precincts.”
“Is that my answer, then?”
“No,” said Silimoor. “You will have your answer later. Much like your Pontifex and your Coronal, I require time to accustom myself to great changes.”
“Then you have answered!”
“Later,” she said, and thanked him for the wine and for the tale he had told, and left him at the table. Calintane eventually rose, and wandered like a spectre through the depths of the Labyrinth in an exhaustion beyond all exhaustion, and heard the people buzzing as the news spread—Arioc the Lady now, Struin the Pontifex, Guadeloom the Coronal—and it was to him like the droning of insects in his ears. He went to his chamber and tried to sleep, but no sleep came, and he fell into gloom over the state of his life, fearing that this sour period of separation from Silimoor had done fatal harm to their love, and that despite her oblique hint to the contrary she would reject his suit. But he was wrong. For, a day later, she sent word that she was ready to go with him, and when Calintane took up his new residence at Castle Mount she was at his side, as she still was many years later when he succeeded Lord Guadeloom as Coronal. His reign in that post was short but cheerful, and during his time he accomplished the construction of the great highway at the summit of the Mount that bears his name; and when in old age he returned to the Labyrinth as Pontifex himself it was without the slightest surprise, for he had lost all capacity for surprise that day long ago when the Pontifex Arioc had proclaimed himself to be the Lady of the Isle.
V
The Desert of Stolen Dreams
SO THE LEGEND of Arioc has obscured the truth of him, Hissune sees now, as legend has obscured truth in so many ways. For in the distortions of time Arioc has come to seem grotesque, whimsical, a clown of sudden instability; and yet if the testimony of Lord Calintane means anything, it was not that way at all. A suffering man sought freedom and chose an outlandish way to attain it: no clown, no madman at all. Hissune, himself trapped in the Labyrinth and longing to taste the fresh air without, finds the Pontifex Arioc an unexpectedly congenial figure—his brother in spirit across the thousands of years.
For a long while thereafter Hissune does not go to the Register of Souls. The impact of those illicit journeys into the past has been too powerful; his head buzzes with stray strands out of the souls of Thesme and Calintane and Sinnabor Lavon and Group Captain Eremoil so that when all of them set up a clamor at once he has difficulty locating Hissune, and that is dismaying. Besides, he has other things to do. After a year and a half he has finished with the tax documents, and by then he has established himself so thoroughly in the House of Records that another assignment is waiting for him, a survey of the distribution of aboriginal population groups in present-day Majipoor. He knows that Lord Valentine has had some problems with Metamorphs—that in fact it was a conspiracy of the Shapeshifter folk that tumbled him from his throne in that weird event of a few years back—and he remembers from what he had overheard among the great ones on Castle Mount during his visit there that it is Lord Valentine’s plan to integrate them more fully into the life of the planet, if that can be done. So Hissune suspects that these statistics he has been asked to compile have some function in the grand strategy of the Coronal, and that gives him a private pleasure.
It gives him, too, occasion for ironic smiles. For he is shrewd enough to see what is happening to the street-boy Hissune. That agile and cunning urchin who caught the Coronal’s eye seven years ago is now an adolescent bureaucrat, transformed, tamed, civil, sedate. So be it, he thinks: one does not remain fourteen years old forever, and a time comes to leave the streets and become a useful member of society. Even so he feels some regret for the loss of the boy he had been. Some of that boy’s mischief still bubbles in him; only some, but enough. He finds himself thinking weighty thoughts about the nature of society on Majipoor, the organic interrelationship of the political forces, the concept that power implies responsibility, that all beings are held together in harmonious union by a sense of reciprocal obligation. The four great Powers of the realm—the Pontifex, the Coronal, the Lady of the Isle, the King of Dreams—how, Hissune wonders, have they been able to work so well together? Even in this profoundly conservative society, where over thousands of years so little has changed, the harmony of the Powers seems miraculous, a balance of forces that must be divinely inspired. Hissune has had no formal education; there is no one to whom he can turn for knowledge of such things; but nevertheless, there is the Register of Souls, with all the teeming life of Majipoor’s past held in a wondrous suspension, ready to release its passionate vitality at a command. It is folly not to explore that pool of knowledge now that such questions trouble his mind. So once again Hissune forges the documents; once again he slides himself glibly past the slow-witted guardians of the archives; once again he punches the keys, seeking now not only amusement and the joy of the forbidden but also an understanding of the evolution of his planet’s political institutions. What a serious young man you are becoming, he tells himself, as the dazzling lights of many colors throb in his mind and the dark, intense presence of another human being, long dead but forever timeless, invades his soul.
1
SUVRAEL LAY like a glowing sword across the southern horizon—an iron band of dull red light, sending shimmering heat-pulsations into the air. Dekkeret, standing at the bow of the freighter on which he had made the long dreary sea journey, felt a quickening of the pulse. Suvrael at last! That dreadful place, that abomination of a continent, that useless and miserable land, now just a few days away, and who knew what horrors would befall him there? But he was prepared. Whatever happens, Dekkeret believed, happens for the best, in Suvrael as on Castle Mount. He was in his twentieth year, a big burly man with a short neck and enormously broad shoulders. This was the second summer of Lord Prestimion’s glorious reign under the great Pontifex Confalume.
It was as an act of penance that Dekkeret had undertaken the voyage to the burning wastes of barren Suvrael. He had committed a shameful deed—certainly not intending it, at first barely realizing the shame of it—while hunting in the Khyntor Marches of the far northland, and some sort of expiation seemed necessary to him. That was in a way a romantic and flamboyant gesture, he knew, but he could forgive himself that. If he did not make romantic and flamboyant gestures at twenty, then when? Surely not ten or fifteen years from now, when he was bound to the wheel of his destinies and had settled snugly in for the inevitable bland easy career in Lord Prestimion’s entourage. This was the moment, if ever. So, then, to Suvrael to purge his soul, no matter the consequences.
His friend and mentor and hunting companion in Khyntor, Akbalik, had not been able to understand. But of course Akbalik was no romantic, and a long way beyond twenty, besides. One night in early spring, over a few flasks of hot golden wine in a rough mountain tavern, Dekkeret had announced his intention and Akbalik’s response had been a blunt snorting laugh. “Suvrael?” he had cried. “You judge yourself too harshly. There’s no sin so foul that it merits a jaunt in Suvrael.”
And Dekkeret, stung, feeling patronized, had slowly shaken his head. “Wrongness lies on me like a stain. I’ll burn it from my soul under the hotland sun.”
“Make the pilgrimage to the Isle instead, if you think you need to do something. Let the blessed Lady heal your spirit.”
“No. Suvrael.”
“Why?”
“To suffer,” said Dekkeret. “To take myself far from the
delights of Castle Mount, to the least pleasant place on Majipoor, to a dismal desert of fiery winds and loathsome dangers. To mortify the flesh, Akbalik, and show my contrition. To lay upon myself the discipline of discomfort and even pain—pain, do you know what that is?—until I can forgive myself. All right?”
Akbalik, grinning, dug his fingers into the thick robe of heavy black Khyntor furs that Dekkeret wore. “All right. But if you must mortify, mortify thoroughly. I assume you’ll not take this from your body all the while you’re under the Suvrael sun.”
Dekkeret chuckled. “There are limits,” he said, “to my need for discomfort.” He reached for the wine. Akbalik was nearly twice Dekkeret’s age, and doubtless found his earnestness funny. So did Dekkeret, to a degree; but that did not swerve him.
“May I try once more to dissuade you?”
“Pointless.”
“Consider the waste,” said Akbalik anyway. “You have a career to look after. Your name is frequently heard at the Castle now. Lord Prestimion has said high things of you. A promising young man, due to climb far, great strength of character, all that kind of noise. Prestimion’s young; he’ll rule a long while; those who are young in his early days will rise as he rises. And here you are, deep in the wilds of Khyntor playing when you should be at court, and already planning another and more reckless trip. Forget this Suvrael nonsense, Dekkeret, and return to the Mount with me. Do the Coronal’s bidding, impress the great ones with your worth, and build for the future. These are wonderful times on Majipoor, and it will be splendid to be among the wielders of power as things unfold. Eh? Eh? Why throw yourself away in Suvrael? No one knows of this—ah—sin of yours, this one little lapse from grace—”
“I know.”
“Then promise never to do it again, and absolve yourself.”
“It’s not so simple,” Dekkeret said.
“To squander a year or two of your life, or perhaps lose your life entirely, on a meaningless, useless journey to—”
“Not meaningless. Not useless.”
“Except on a purely personal level it is.”
“Not so, Akbalik. I’ve been in touch with the people of the Pontificate and I’ve wangled an official appointment. I’m a mission of inquiry. Doesn’t that sound grand? Suvrael isn’t exporting its quota of meat and livestock and the Pontifex wants to know why. You see? I continue to further my career even while going off on what seems to you a wholly private adventure.”
“So you’ve already made arrangements.”
“I leave on Fourday next.” Dekkeret reached his hand toward his friend. “It’ll be at least two years. We’ll meet again on the Mount. What do you say, Akbalik, the games at High Morpin, two years from Winterday?”
Akbalik’s calm gray eyes fastened intently on Dekkeret’s. “I will be there,” he said slowly. “I pray that you’ll be too.”
That conversation lay only some months in the past; but to Dekkeret now, feeling the throbbing heat of the southern continent reaching toward him over the pale green water of the Inner Sea, it seemed incredibly long ago, and the voyage infinitely long. The first part of the journey had been pleasing enough—down out of the mountains to the grand metropolis of Ni-moya, and then by riverboat down the Zimr to the port of Piliplok on the eastern coast. There he had boarded a freighter, the cheapest transport he could find, bound for the Suvraelu city of Tolaghai, and then it had been south and south and south all summer long, in a ghastly little cabin just downwind from a hold stuffed with bales of dried baby sea-dragons, and as the ship crossed into the tropics the days presented a heat unlike anything he had ever known, and the nights were little better; and the crew, mostly a bunch of shaggy Skandars, laughed at his discomfort and told him that he had better enjoy the cool weather while he could, for real heat was waiting for him in Suvrael. Well, he had wanted to suffer, and his wish was being amply granted already, and worse to come. He did not complain. He felt no regret. But his comfortable life among the young knights of Castle Mount had not prepared him for sleepless nights with the reek of sea-dragon in his nostrils like stilettos, nor for the stifling heat that engulfed the ship a few weeks out of Piliplok, nor for the intense boredom of the unchanging seascape. The planet was so impossibly huge, that was the trouble. It took forever to get from anywhere to anywhere. Crossing from his native continent of Alhanroel to the western land of Zimroel had been a big enough project, by riverboat to Alaisor from the Mount, then by sea to Piliplok and up the river into the mountain marches, but he had had Akbalik with him to lighten the time, and there had been the excitement of his first major journey, the strangeness of new places, new foods, new accents. And he had had the hunting expedition to look forward to. But this? This imprisonment aboard a dirty creaking ship stuffed with parched meat of evil odor? This interminable round of empty days without friends, without duties, without conversation? If only some monstrous sea-dragon would heave into view, he thought, and enliven the journey with a bit of peril; but no, no, the dragons in their migrations were elsewhere, one great herd said to be in western waters out by Narabal just now and another midway between Piliplok and the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and Dekkeret saw none of the vast beasts, not even a few stragglers. What made the boredom worse was that it did not seem to have any value as catharsis. He was suffering, true, and suffering was what he imagined would heal him of his wound, but yet the awareness of the terrible thing he had done in the mountains did not seem to diminish at all. He was hot and bored and restless, and guilt still clawed at him, and still he tormented himself with the ironic knowledge that he was being praised by no less than the Coronal Lord Prestimion for great strength of character while he could find only weakness and cowardice and foolishness in himself. Perhaps it takes more than humidity and boredom and foul odors to cure one’s soul, Dekkeret decided. At any rate he had had more than enough of the process of getting to Suvrael, and he was ready to begin the next phase of his pilgrimage into the unknown.
2
EVERY JOURNEY ENDS, even an endless one. The hot wind out of the south intensified day after day until the deck was too hot to walk and the barefoot Skandars had to swab it down every few hours; and then suddenly the burning mass of sullen darkness on the horizon resolved itself into a shoreline and the jaws of a harbor. They had reached Tolaghai at last.
All of Suvrael was tropical; most of its interior was desert, oppressed perpetually by a colossal weight of dry dead air around the periphery of which searing cyclones whirled; but the fringes of the continent were more or less habitable, and there were five major cities along the coasts, of which Tolaghai was the largest and the one most closely linked by commerce to the rest of Majipoor. As the freighter entered the broad harbor Dekkeret was struck by the strangeness of the place. In his brief time he had seen a great many of the giant world’s cities—a dozen of the fifty on the flanks of Castle Mount, and towering windswept Alaisor, and the vast astounding white-walled Ni-moya, and magnificent Piliplok, and many others—and never had he beheld a city with the harsh, mysterious, forbidding look of this one. Tolaghai clung like a crab to a low ridge along the sea. Its buildings were flat, squat things of sundried orange brick, with mere slits for windows, and there were only sparse plantings around them, dismaying angular palms, mainly, that were all bare trunk with tiny feathery crowns far overhead. Here at midday the streets were almost deserted. The hot wind blew sprays of sand over the cracked paving-stones. To Dekkeret the city seemed like some sort of prison outpost, brutal and ugly, or perhaps a city out of time, belonging to some prehistoric folk of a regimented and authoritarian race. Why had anyone chosen to build a place so hideous? Doubtless it was out of mere efficiency, ugliness like this being the best way to cope with the climate of the land, but still, still, Dekkeret thought, the challenges of heat and drought might surely have called forth some less repellent architecture.
In his innocence Dekkeret thought he could simply go ashore at once, but that was not how things worked here. The ship lay at anchor for more than a
n hour before the port officials, three glum-looking Hjorts, came aboard. Then followed a lengthy business with sanitary inspections and cargo manifests and haggling over docking fees; and finally the dozen or so passengers were cleared for landing. A porter of the Ghayrog race seized Dekkeret’s luggage and asked the name of his hotel. He replied that he had not booked one, and the reptilian-looking creature, tongue flickering and black fleshy hair writhing like a mass of serpents, gave him an icy mocking look and said, “What will you pay? Are you rich?”
“Not very. What can I get for three crowns a night?”
“Little. Bed of straw. Vermin on the walls.”
“Take me there,” said Dekkeret.
The Ghayrog looked as startled as a Ghayrog is capable of looking. “You will not be happy there, fine sir. You have the bearing of lordship about you.”
“Perhaps so, but I have a poor man’s purse. I’ll take my chances with the vermin.”
Actually the inn turned out to be not as bad as he feared: ancient, squalid, and depressing, yes, but so was everything else in sight, and the room he received seemed almost palatial after his lodgings on the ship. Nor was there the reek of sea-dragon flesh here, only the arid piercing flavor of Suvraelu air, like the stuff within a flask that had been sealed a thousand years. He gave the Ghayrog a half-crown piece, for which he had no thanks, and unpacked his few belongings.
In late afternoon Dekkeret went out. The stifling heat had dropped not at all, but the thin cutting wind seemed less fierce now, and there were more people in the streets. All the same the city felt grim. This was the right sort of place for doing a penance. He loathed the blankfaced brick buildings, he hated the withered look of the landscape, and he missed the soft sweet air of his native city of Normork on the lower slopes of Castle Mount. Why, he wondered, would anyone choose to live here, when there was opportunity aplenty on the gentler continents? What starkness of the soul drove some millions of his fellow citizens to scourge themselves in the daily severities of life on Suvrael?
Majipoor Chronicles Page 13
