Destiny, Valentine thought, could not be rushed. Thus far things had 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 was a grotesque and fanciful structure, but not without a beauty of sorts. Oceangoing 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 riverboat, 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 stern, an upswept superstructure of many levels in which passengers were housed. Belowdecks were cargo holds, steerage quarters, 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 nearly every square foot of the surface, decorating it with scrollwork, bizarre dadoes, outjutting joists, and similar flourishes of a hundred kinds.
The riverboat seemed a vast and teeming microcosm. As they waited for sailing, Valentine and Deliamber and Carabella strolled the deck, 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 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 double-headed bodies and aloof, imperious mien, drifted like emissaries 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.
Deliamber saw them first. The little Vroon made a clucking sound and touched Valentine’s hand. “See them? Let’s hope Sleet doesn’t.”
“Which ones?” Valentine asked.
“By the railing. Standing alone, looking uneasy. They wear their natural form.”
Valentine stared. There were five of them, perhaps a male and a female adult and three younger ones. They were slender, angular, long-legged beings, the older ones taller than he, with a frail, insubstantial look to them. Their skins were sallow, almost green in hue. Their faces approached the human pattern in construction, except that their cheekbones were sharp as blades, their lips were almost nonexistent and their noses were reduced to mere bumps, and their eyes, set on angles that sloped inward toward the center, were tapered and without pupils. Valentine was unable to decide whether these Metamorphs bore themselves with arrogance or with timidity: certainly they must regard themselves as in hostile territory aboard this riverboat, these natives of the ancient race, these descendants of those who had possessed Majipoor before the coming of the first Earthborn settlers fourteen thousand years ago. He could not take his eyes from them.
“How is the changing of shape accomplished?” he asked.
“Their bones are not joined like those of most races,” answered Deliamber. “Under muscular pressure they will move and take up new patterns. Also they have mimicry cells in their skins, that allow them to alter color and texture, and there are other adaptations. An adult can transform itself almost instantaneously.”
“And what purpose does this serve?”
“Who can say? Most likely the Metamorphs ask what purpose there was in creating races in this universe that are unable to shift shape. It must have some value to them.”
“Very little,” said Carabella acidly, “if they could have such powers and still have their world snatched away from them.”
“Shifting shape is not enough of a defense,” Deliamber replied, “when people travel from one star to another to steal your home.”
The Metamorphs fascinated Valentine. To him they represented artifacts of Majipoor’s long history, archaeological relicts, survivors from the era when there were no humans here, nor Skandars nor Vroons nor Ghayrogs, only these fragile green people spread out across a colossal planet. Before the settlers came—the intruders, ultimately the conquerors. How long ago it had been! He wished they would perform a transformation as he watched, perhaps turn into Skandars or Liimen before his eyes. But they remained unwavering in their identities.
Shanamir, looking agitated, appeared suddenly out of the crowd. He seized Valentine’s arm and blurted, “Do you know what’s on board with us? I heard the cargo-handlers talking. There’s a whole family of Shape—”
“Not so loud,” Valentine said. “Look yonder.”
The boy looked and shivered. “Scary things, they are.”
“Where’s Sleet?”
“On the bridge, with Zalzan Kavol. They’re trying to get a permit to perform tonight. If he sees them—”
“He’ll have to confront Metamorphs sooner or later,” Valentine murmured. To Deliamber he said, “Is it uncommon for them to be seen outside their reservation?”
“They are found everywhere, but never in great numbers, and rarely in their own form. There might be eleven of them living in Pidruid, say, and six in Falkynkip, nine in Dulorn—”
“Disguised?”
“Yes, as Ghayrogs or Hjorts or humans, whatever seems best in a certain place.”
The Metamorphs began to leave the deck. They moved with great dignity, but, unlike the little Su-Suheris group, there was nothing imperious about them; they seemed rather to give an impression of wishing they were invisible.
Valentine said, “Do they live in their territory by choice or compulsion?”
“Some of each, I think. When Lord Stiamot completed the conquest, he forced them to leave Alhanroel entirely. But Zimroel was barely settled then, just the coastal outposts, and they were allowed most of the interior. They chose only the territory between the Zimr and the southern mountains, though, where access could easily be controlled, and withdrew into that. By now there’s a tradition that the Metamorphs dwell only in that territory, except for the unofficial few living out in the cities. But I have no idea whether that tradition has force of law. Certainly they pay little attention to the decrees that emerge from the Labyrinth or Castle Mount.”
“If imperial law matters so little to them, are we not taking great risks in going to Ilirivoyne?”
Deliamber laughed. “The days when Metamorphs attacked outsiders for the sheer love of vengeance are long over, so I am assured. They are a shy and sullen people, but they will do us no harm, and we’ll probably leave their country intact and well laden with the money that Zalzan Kavol loves so much. Look, here he comes now.”
The Skandar, with Sleet beside him, approached, looking self-satisfied.
“We have arranged for the right to perform,” he announced. “Fifty crowns for an hour’s work, right after dinner! We’ll give them our simplest tricks, though. Why exert ourselves before we get to Ilirivoyne?”
“No,” Valentine said. “We should do our best.” He looked hard at Sleet. “There’s a party of Metamorphs aboard this boat. Perhaps they’ll carry the word of our excellence ahead of us to Ilirivoyne.”
“Wisely argued,” said Z
alzan Kavol.
Sleet was taut and fearful. His nostrils flickered, his lips compressed, he made holy signs with his left hand at his side. Valentine turned to him and said in a low voice, “Now the process of healing begins. Juggle for them tonight as you would for the court of the Pontifex.”
Hoarsely Sleet said, “They are my enemies!”
“Not these. They are not the ones of your dream. Those have done you all the damage that lay in their power, and it was long ago.”
“It sickens me to be on the same boat.”
“There’s no leaving it now,” Valentine said. “There are only five of them. A small dose—good practice for meeting what awaits us in Ilirivoyne.”
“Ilirivoyne—”
“There is no avoiding Ilirivoyne,” said Valentine. “Your pledge to me, Sleet—”
Sleet regarded Valentine in silence a moment.
“Yes, my lord,” he whispered.
“Come, then. Juggle with me: we both need practice. And remember to call me Valentine!”
They found a quiet place belowdecks and worked out with the clubs; there was an odd reversal in their roles at first, for Valentine juggled flawlessly, while Sleet was as clumsy as a tyro, dropping the clubs constantly and in several instances bruising his fingers. But in a few minutes his disciplines asserted themselves. He filled the air with clubs, interchanging them with Valentine in patterns of such complexity that it left Valentine laughing and gasping, and finally he had to beg a halt and ask Sleet to return to more manageable cascades.
That night at the deckside performance—the first since the impromptu event staged for the amusement of the forest-brethren—Zalzan Kavol ordered a program that they had never done before an audience. The jugglers divided into three groups of three—Sleet, Carabella, and Valentine; Zalzan Kavol, Thelkar, and Gibor Haern; Heitrag Kavol, Rovorn, and Erfon Kavol—and engaged in simultaneous triple exchanges in the same rhythm, one group of Skandars juggling knives, the other flaming torches, and the humans silver clubs. It was one of the most severe tests of his skills that Valentine had yet experienced. The symmetry of the routine depended on perfection. One dropped implement by any of the nine would ruin the total effect. He was the weakest link; on him the entire impact of the performance depended, therefore.
But he dropped no clubs, and the applause, when the jugglers had ended their act in a flurry of high throws and jaunty catches, was overwhelming. As he took his bows Valentine noticed the family of Metamorphs seated only a few rows away. He glanced at Sleet, who bowed and bowed again, ever more deeply.
As they skipped from the stage Sleet said, “I saw them when we started, and then I forgot about them. I forgot about them, Valentine!” He laughed. “They were nothing at all like the creature I remember from my dream.”
10
The troupe slept that night in a dank, crowded hold in the bowels of the riverboat. Valentine found himself jammed between Shanamir and Lisamon Hultin on the thinly cushioned floor, and the proximity of the warrior-woman seemed to guarantee that he would have no sleep, for her snoring was a fierce insistent buzz, and more distracting even than the snore was the fear that as her vast body rolled and thrashed about beside him he would be crushed beneath it. Several times indeed she fetched up against him and he was hard put to extricate himself. But soon she lay more quietly, and he felt sleep stealing over him.
A dream came in which he was Coronal, Lord Valentine of the olive skin and black beard, and sat once more in Castle Mount wielding the seals of power, and then somehow he was in a southern city, a moist steaming tropical place of giant vines and gaudy red blossoms, a city that he knew to be Til-omon at the far side of Zimroel, and he attended there a grand feast in his honor. There was another high guest at the table, a somber-eyed man with coarse skin, who was Dominin Barjazid, second son of the King of Dreams, and Dominin Barjazid poured wine in honor of the Coronal, and offered toasts, crying out long life and predicting a glorious reign, a reign to rank with those of Lord Stiamot and Lord Prestimion and Lord Confalume. And Lord Valentine drank, and drank again, and grew flushed and merry, and offered toasts of his own, to his guest and to the mayor of Til-omon and to the duke of the province, and to Simonan Barjazid the King of Dreams, and to the Pontifex Tyeveras, and to the Lady of the Isle, his own beloved mother, and the goblet was filled and filled once again, amber wine and red wine and the blue wine of the south, until finally he could drink no more, and went to his bedchamber and dropped instantly into sleep. As he slept figures moved about him, the men of Dominin Barjazid’s entourage, lifting him and carrying him wrapped in silken sheets, taking him somewhere, and he could give no resistance, for it seemed to him that his arms and legs would not obey him, as if this were a dream, this scene within a dream. And Valentine beheld himself on a table in a secret room, and now his hair was yellow and his skin was fair, and it was Dominin Barjazid who wore the face of the Coronal.
“Take him to some city in the far north,” said the false Lord Valentine, “and turn him loose, and let him make his own way upon the world.”
The dream would have continued, but Valentine found himself smothering in his sleep, and came up into consciousness to discover Lisamon Hultin sprawled against him with one of her beefy arms over his face. With some effort he freed himself, but then there was no returning to sleep.
In the morning he said nothing to anyone of his dream: it was becoming time, he suspected, to keep the information of the night to himself, for they were starting to border on affairs of state. This was the second time he had dreamed of having been supplanted as Coronal by Dominin Barjazid, and Carabella, weeks ago, had dreamed that enemies unknown had drugged him and stolen his identity. All these dreams might yet prove to be nothing but fantasy or parable, but Valentine inclined now to doubt that. There was too strong a consistency to them, too frequent a repetition of underlying structures.
And if a Barjazid now wore the starburst crown? What then, what then?
The Valentine of Pidruid would have shrugged and said, No matter, one overlord is the same as another, but the Valentine now sailing from Khyntor to Verf took a more thoughtful view of things. There was a balance of power in this world, a balance carefully designed over a span of thousands of years, a system that had been evolving since Lord Stiamot’s time, or perhaps earlier, out of whatever forgotten polities had ruled Majipoor in the first centuries of the settlement. And in that system an inaccessible Pontifex ruled through the vehicle of a vigorous and dynamic Coronal of his own choosing, with the official known as the King of Dreams functioning to execute the commands of the government and chastise lawbreakers by virtue of his entry into the minds of sleepers, and the Lady of the Isle, mother of the Coronal, contributing a tempering of love and wisdom. There was strength to the system, or else it could not have endured so many thousands of years; under it, Majipoor was a happy and prosperous world, subject, true, to the frailties of flesh and the vagaries of nature, but mainly free of conflict and suffering. What now, Valentine wondered, if a Barjazid of the King’s blood were to put aside a lawfully constituted Coronal and interpose himself in that divinely ordained balance? What harm to the commonwealth, what disruption of public tranquillity?
And what might be said of a fallen Coronal who chooses to accept his altered destiny and leaves the usurper unchallenged? Was that not an abdication, and had there ever been an abdication of a Coronal in Majipoor’s history? Would he not thereby become a co-conspirator in Dominin Barjazid’s overthrow of order?
The last of his hesitations were going from him. It had seemed a comical thing, or a bizarre one, to Valentine the juggler when the first hints had come to him that he might be truly Lord Valentine the Coronal. That had been an absurdity, a lunacy, a farce. No longer. The texture of his dreams carried the weight of plausibility. A monstrous thing had happened, indeed. The full import of it was only now coming clear to him. And it was his task, that he must accept without further question, to set things right.
But how? Cha
llenge an incumbent Coronal? Rise up in juggler’s costume to claim Castle Mount?
He spent the morning quietly, giving no hint of his thoughts. Mostly he remained at the rail, staring at the far-off shore. The river’s immensity was beyond his understanding: at some points here it was so wide that no land could be seen, and in other places what Valentine took to be the shore turned out to be islands, themselves of great size, with miles of water between their farther sides and the riverbank. The flow of the river was strong, and the huge riverboat was being swept rapidly along eastward.
The day was bright, and the river rippled and glinted in the sparkling sunlight. In the afternoon a light rain began to fall, out of clouds so compact that the sunlight remained bright around them. The rain increased in intensity and the jugglers were forced to cancel their second performance, to Zalzan Kavol’s great annoyance. They huddled under cover.
That night Valentine took care to sleep beside Carabella, and left the snores of Lisamon Hultin for the Skandars to cope with. He waited almost eagerly for revealing new dreams. But what came to him was useless, the ordinary formless hodgepodge of fantasy and chaos, of nameless streets and unfamiliar faces, of bright lights and garish colors, of absurd disputes, disjointed conversations, and unfocused images, and in the morning the riverboat arrived at the port of Verf on the river’s southern bank.
11
“The province of the Metamorphs,” said Autifon Deliamber, “is named Piurifayne, after the name by which the Metamorphs call themselves in their own language, which is Piurivar. It is bounded on the north by the outlying suburb of Verf, on the west by the Velathys Scarp, on the south by the substantial range of mountains known as the Gonghars, and on the east by the River Steiche, an important tributary of the Zimr. I have beheld each of those boundary zones with my own eyes, though I have never entered Piurifayne itself. To enter is difficult, for the Velathys Scarp is a sheer wall a mile high and three hundred miles long; the Gonghars are stormswept and disagreeable; and the Steiche is a wild unruly river full of rapids and turbulence. The only rational way in is through Verf and down through Piurifayne Gate.”
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