Lord Valentine's Castle

by Robert Silverberg

  Their bodies moved in easy rhythms, as though they had been lovers for months and were well practiced with one another. Her slender powerful legs clasped his waist and they rolled over and over, until they came almost to the edge of the stream and could feel its chilly spray on their sweaty skins. They paused there, laughing, and rolled back the other way. This time they came to rest against one of the gray-green bushes, Carabella pulling him downward, taking the thrust of his weight without difficulty.

  “Now!” she cried, and he heard her hiss and moan, and then her fingers dug deep into his flesh and a furious spasm racked her body, and in that same instant he gave himself up fully to the forces that were sweeping through him.

  Afterward he lay gasping and half dazed in her embrace, listening to the booming of his own heart.

  “We’ll sleep here,” she whispered. “No one will trouble us on this night.” She stroked his forehead, pushing his soft yellow hair back from his eyes, smoothing it into place. Lightly she kissed the tip of his nose. She was casual, playful, kittenish: that dark erotic intensity was gone from her, burned away in the fires of passion. But he felt shaken, stunned, confused. For him there had been sudden sharp ecstasy, yes. But in that moment of ecstasy he had found himself peering through gates of dazzling light into a mysterious realm without color or form or substance, and he had teetered precariously on the brink of that unknown before tumbling back into the world of this reality.

  He could not speak. Nothing he might say seemed appropriate. He had not expected such disorientation to come out of the act of love. Carabella evidently sensed the disquiet in him, for she said nothing, only held him, rocked him gently, drew his head against her breast, sang softly to him.

  In the warmth of the night he drifted gradually into sleep.

  When the dream-images came, they were harsh and terrifying.

  He was carried back yet again to that bleak, familiar purple plain. The same mocking faces leered at him from the purple sky, but this time he was not alone. Looming up against him was a figure of dark visage and heavy, oppressive physical presence whom Valentine understood to be his brother, although in the fierce crackling glow of the amber sun he could not clearly see the other man’s features. And the dream enacted itself against a background of somber music, the low keening note of mind-music that denoted the peril-dream, the threat-dream, the death-dream.

  The two men were locked in a bitter duel, and only one would come forth from the duel alive.

  “Brother!” Valentine cried in shock and horror. “No!” He stirred and twisted and came swimming up to the surface of sleep, and hovered there for an instant. But his training lay too deep for that. One did not flee dreams, one did not reject them no matter how appalling. One entered fully into them and accepted their guidance; one came to grips with the unthinkable in dreams, and to avoid it then meant the inevitability of confronting it, and being defeated by it, in waking life.

  Deliberately Valentine drove himself downward again, through the borderland between wakefulness and sleep, and felt stealing about him once more the malign presence of his enemy, his brother.

  They were armed with swords, but the contest was unequal, for Valentine’s weapon was a flimsy rapier, the brother’s a massive saber. Through skill and agility Valentine tried desperately to slip his sword past his brother’s guard. Impossible. With slow weighty strokes the other parried steadily, sweeping Valentine’s frail blade aside and driving him inexorably backward over the rough gullied terrain.

  Vultures circled overhead. Out of the sky came a hissing death-song. There would be blood spilling soon, and a life returning to the Source.

  Step by step Valentine yielded, knowing that a ravine lay just behind him and further retreat soon would be forestalled. His arm was aching, his eyes pounded with fatigue, there was the gritty taste of sand in his mouth, his last strength ebbing. Backward—backward—

  “Brother!” he cried in anguish. “In the name of the Divine—”

  His plea drew harsh laughter and a sharp obscenity. The saber descended in a mighty swing. Valentine thrust out his blade and was shaken by a terrible body-numbing shiver as metal rang against metal and his light sword was snapped to a stump. In the same moment he tripped over a dry sand-scoured snag of wood and tumbled heavily to the ground, landing in a tangle of thorny creeping stems. The huge man with the saber reared above him, blotting out the sun, filling the sky. The death-song took on a murderous screeching intensity of timbre; the vultures fluttered and swooped.

  The sleeping Valentine moaned and trembled. He turned again, huddled close against Carabella, took warmth from her as the dread cold of the death-dream enveloped him. It would be so easy to awaken now, to escape the horror and violence of these images, to swim to safety on the shores of consciousness. But no. With fierce discipline he thrust himself again into the nightmare. The giant figure laughed. The saber rose high. The world lurched and crumbled beneath his fallen body. He commended his soul to the Lady and waited for the blow to descend.

  And the blow of the saber was awkward and lame, and with a foolish thud his brother’s sword buried itself deep in the sand, and the texture and thrust of the dream was altered, for no longer did Valentine hear the wailing hiss of death-songs, and now he found everything reversed, found currents of new and unexpected energy pouring into him. He leaped to his feet. His brother tugged at the saber, cursed, struggled to pull it from the ground, and Valentine snapped it with a contemptuous kick.

  He seized the other man bare-handed.

  Now it was Valentine who commanded the duel, and his cowering brother who retreated before a shower of blows, sagging now to his knees as Valentine battered him, growling like a wounded bear, shaking his bloody head from side to side, taking the beating and offering no defense, murmuring only, “Brother…brother…” as Valentine pounded him to the sand.

  He lay still and Valentine stood victor over him.

  Let it be dawn, Valentine prayed, and released himself from sleep.

  It was still dark. He blinked and clasped his arms to his sides and shivered. Violent frenzied images, fragmented but potent, swam in his troubled mind.

  Carabella studied him thoughtfully.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I dreamed.”

  “You cried out three times. I thought you would wake. A strong dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m puzzled. Troubled.”

  “Tell me your dream.”

  It was an intimate request. And yet were they not lovers? Had they not gone down into the world of sleep together, partners in the night’s quest?

  “I dreamed that I fought with my brother,” he said hoarsely. “That we dueled with swords in a hot barren desert, that he came close to killing me, that at the last moment I rose from the ground and found new strength and—and—and I beat him to death with my fists.”

  Her eyes glittered like an animal’s in the darkness: she watched him like some wary beady-eyed drole.

  “Do you always have such ferocious dreams?” she asked after a time.

  “I don’t think so. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “Not only the violence. Carabella, I have no brother!”

  She laughed. “Do you expect dreams to correspond exactly to reality? Valentine, Valentine, where were you taught? Dreams have a truth deeper than the reality we know. The brother of your dream could be anyone or no one: Zalzan Kavol, Sleet, your father, Lord Valentine, the Pontifex Tyeveras, Shanamir, even me. You know that unless they be specific sendings, dreams transform all things.”

  “I know, yes. But what does it mean, Carabella? To duel with a brother—to be killed, almost, by him—to slay him instead—”

  “You want me to speak your dreams for you?” she said, surprised.

  “It speaks nothing to me except fear and mystery.”

  “You were badly frightened, yes. You were soaked with sweat and you cried out again and again.
But painful dreams are the most revealing ones, Valentine. Speak it for yourself.”

  “My brother—I have no brother—”

  “I told you, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Did I make war against myself, then? I don’t understand. I have no enemies, Carabella.”

  “Your father,” she suggested.

  He considered that. His father? He searched for a face that he could give to the shadowy man with the saber, but he found only more darkness.

  “I don’t remember him,” Valentine said.

  “Did he die when you were a boy?”

  “I think so.” Valentine shook his head, which was beginning to throb. “I don’t remember. I see a big man—his beard is dark, his eyes are dark—”

  “What was his name? When did he die?”

  Valentine shook his head again.

  Carabella leaned close. She took his hands in hers and said softly, “Valentine, where were you born?”

  “In the east.”

  “Yes, you’ve said that. Where? What city, what province?”

  “Ni-moya?” he said vaguely.

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Ni-moya,” he repeated. “A big house, a garden, near the bend of the river. Yes. I see myself there. Swimming in the river. Hunting in the duke’s forest. Am I dreaming that?”

  “Are you?”

  “It feels like—something I’ve read. Like a story I’ve been told.”

  “Your mother’s name?”

  He began to reply, but when he opened his mouth no name came.

  “She died young too?”

  “Galiara,” Valentine said without conviction. “That was it. Galiara.”

  “A lovely name. Tell me what she looked like.”

  “She—she had—” He faltered. “Golden hair, like mine. Sweet smooth skin. Her eyes—her voice sounded like—it’s so hard, Carabella!”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come. Here.” Once again she drew him close. She was much smaller than he, and yet she seemed very much stronger now, and he took comfort from her closeness. Gently she said, “You don’t remember anything, do you, Valentine?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not where you were born or where you came from or what your parents looked like or even where you were last Starday, isn’t that so? Your dreams can’t guide you because you have nothing to speak against them.” Her hands roamed his head; her fingers probed delicately but firmly into his scalp.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking to see if you’ve been hurt. A blow on the head can take the memory away, you know.”

  “Is there anything there?”

  “No. No, nothing. No marks. No bumps. But that doesn’t mean anything. It could have happened a month or two ago. I’ll look again when the sun has risen.”

  “I like the feel of your hands touching me, Carabella.”

  “I like touching you,” she said.

  He lay quietly against her. The words that had passed between them just now troubled him intensely. Other people, he realized, had rich memories of their childhood and adolescence, and knew the names of their parents and were sure of the place where they had been born, and he had nothing but his overlay of hazy notions, this mist of thin untrustworthy memories covering a well of blankness, yes, and he had known that the blankness was there but had chosen not to peer into it. Now Carabella had forced that upon him. Why, he wondered, was he unlike others? Why were his memories without substance? Had he taken some blow on the head, as she suggested? Or was it just that his mind was dim, that he lacked the capacity to retain the imprints of experience, that he had wandered for years across the face of Majipoor, erasing each yesterday as each new day dawned?

  Neither of them slept again that night. Toward morning, quite suddenly, they began to make love again, in silence, in a kind of driven purposeful way quite different from the earlier playful union; and then they rose, still saying nothing, and bathed in the chilly little brook, and dressed and made their way through town to the inn. There were still some bleary-eyed revelers staggering in the streets as the bright eye of the sun rose high over Pidruid.

  10

  At Carabella’s prompting Valentine took Sleet into his confidence, and told him of his dream and of the conversation that followed it. The little white-haired juggler listened thoughtfully, never interrupting, looking increasingly solemn.

  He said when Valentine had done, “You should seek guidance from a dream-speaker. This is too strong a sending to be ignored.”

  “Do you think it is a sending, then?”

  “Possibly it is,” said Sleet.

  “From the King?”

  Sleet spread his hands and contemplated his fingertips. “It could be. You will have to wait and pay close heed. The King never sends simple messages.”

  “It could be from the Lady just as well,” Carabella offered. “The violence of it shouldn’t deceive us. The Lady sends violent dreams when the need exists.”

  “And some dreams,” said Sleet with a smile, “come neither from the Lady nor from the King, but up out of the depths of our own foggy minds. Who can tell unaided? Valentine, see a dream-speaker.”

  “Would a dream-speaker help me find my memories, then?”

  “A dream-speaker or a sorcerer, yes. If dreams are no guidance to your past, nothing will be.”

  “Besides,” said Carabella, “a dream so strong should not go unexamined. There is your responsibility to be considered. If a dream commands an action, and you choose not to pursue that action—” She shrugged. “Your soul will answer for it, and swiftly. Find a speaker, Valentine.”

  “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 Kavol 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!”

  As Valentine 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 the side of 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 Kavol but his brother Erfon, who even as Skandars went was dour and chill. “Are you ready?” he asked gruffly.