“So be it. Four stand in opposition, which falls well short of a carrying number. Stasilaine, will you ask Prince Hissune to enter the council-chamber?” Glancing about the room, Elidath added, “If any who cast opposing votes wish now to withdraw them, this is the moment.”
“Let my vote stand,” the Duke of Halanx said at once.
“And mine,” said the Prince of Banglecode, and Nimian of Dundilmir also.
“And what says the son of Lord Voriax?” Elidath asked.
Divvis smiled. “I change my vote. The thing is done: let it have my support as well.”
At that Manganot rose halfway from his seat, gaping in astonishment, face coloring. He began to say something, but Divvis cut short his words with an upraised hand and a sharp sudden glare. Frowning, shaking his head in bewilderment, Manganot subsided. The Duke of Halanx whispered something to Prince Nimian, who shrugged and made no reply.
Stasilaine returned, with Hissune beside him, clad in a simple white robe with a golden splash on the left shoulder. His face was lightly flushed, his eyes were unnaturally bright, but he was otherwise calm and contained.
Elidath said, “By nomination of the Coronal Lord Valentine and the acclamation of these high lords, we name you to the principate of Majipoor, with full rank and privilege.”
Hissune bowed his head. “I am moved beyond words, my lords. I can barely express my gratitude to you all for bestowing this unimaginable honor upon me.”
Then he looked up, and his gaze traveled through the room, resting for a moment on Nimian, and on Manganot, and on the Duke of Halanx, and then, for a long while, on Divvis, who returned his stare coolly and with a faint smile.
THAT LONE SEA DRAGON, so strangely beating its wings against the water at twilight, was a harbinger of stranger things to come. In the third week of the voyage from Alaisor to the Isle of Sleep an entire herd of the huge creatures suddenly manifested itself off the starboard side of the Lady Thiin.
Pandelume, the pilot, a Skandar with deep blue fur who once had hunted sea dragons for her livelihood, was the first to sight them, just after dawn, as she was taking her sightings from the observation deck. She carried the news to Asenhart the Grand Admiral, who conferred with Autifon Deliamber, who took it upon himself to awaken the Coronal.
Valentine went quickly to the deck. By now the sun had come up out of Alhanroel and cast long shadows upon the waters. The pilot handed him her seeing-tube and he put it to his eye, and she trained it for him on the shapes that moved through the sea far in the distance.
He stared, seeing little at first except the gentle swells of the open sea, then shifting his gaze slightly to the north and refining his focus to bring the sea dragons into view: dark humped shapes thronging the water, moving in close formation, swimming with strange purposefulness. Now and again a long neck rose high above the surface, or vast wings were fanned and fluttered and spread out on the bosom of the sea.
“There must be a hundred of them,” cried Valentine, amazed.
“More than that, my lord,” said Pandelume. “Never while I was hunting them did I encounter a herd so big. Can you see the kings? Five of them, at least. And half a dozen more, nearly as large. And dozens of cows, and young ones, too many to count—”
“I see them,” Valentine said. In the center of the group was a small phalanx of animals of monstrous size, all but submerged, but their spine-ridges cleaving the surface. “Six big ones, I’d say. Monsters—bigger even than the one that shipwrecked me when I sailed on the Brangalyn! And in the wrong waters. What are they doing here? Asenhart, have you ever heard of sea-dragon herds coming up this side of the Isle?”
“Never, my lord,” the Hjort said somberly. “For thirty years I have sailed between Numinor and Alaisor and never once seen a dragon. Never once! And now an entire herd—”
“The Lady be thanked they’re moving away from us,” said Sleet.
“But why are they here at all?” Valentine asked.
No one had an answer to that. It seemed unreasonable that the movements of sea dragons through the inhabited parts of Majipoor should so suddenly undergo drastic change, when for thousands of years the marine herds had with extraordinary loyalty followed well-worn roads in the sea. Placidly did each herd take the same route on each of its lengthy migrations around the world, to the dragons’ great loss, for the dragon hunters out of Piliplok, knowing where to find them, fell upon them each year in the proper season and worked a fearful slaughter on them so that dragon meat and dragon oil and dragon milk and dragon bones and many another dragon-derived products might be sold at high profit in the marketplaces of the world. Still the dragons traveled as they always had traveled. The vagaries of winds and currents and temperatures sometimes might induce them to shift some hundreds of miles north or south of their customary paths, probably because the sea creatures on which they fed had shifted, but nothing like this departure had ever been seen before—a whole herd of dragons curving up the eastern side of the Isle of Sleep and apparently making for the polar regions, instead of passing south of the Isle and the coast of Alhanroel to enter the waters of the Great Sea.
Nor was this the only such herd. Five days later another was sighted: a smaller group, no more than thirty, with no giants among them, that passed within a mile or two of the fleet. Uncomfortably close, said Admiral Asenhart: for the ships bearing the Coronal and his party to the Isle carried no weaponry of any significant sort, and sea dragons were creatures of uncertain temper and formidable power, much given to shattering such hapless vessels as might stumble across their paths at the wrong moment.
Six weeks remained to the voyage. In dragon-infested seas that would seem like a very long while.
“Perhaps we should turn back, and make this crossing at another season,” suggested Tunigorn, who had never been to sea before and had not been finding the experience much to his liking even before this.
Sleet also seemed more than uneasy about the journey; Asenhart appeared troubled; Carabella spent much time peering moodily to sea, as if expecting a dragon to breach the water just beneath the Lady Thiin’s hull. But Valentine, although he had known the fury of the sea dragon at first hand himself, having been not merely shipwrecked by one but indeed swept into its cavernous gut in the most bizarre of the adventures of his years of exile, would not hear of it. It was essential to continue, he insisted. He must confer with the Lady; he must inspect blight-stricken Zimroel; to return to Alhanroel, he felt, was to abdicate all responsibility. And what reason was there, anyway, to think that these strayed sea dragons meant any harm to the fleet? They seemed bound with great swiftness and intentness upon their mysterious route, and paid no heed to any of the ships that passed by them.
Yet a third group of dragons appeared, a week after the second. These were some fifty in number, with three giants among them. “It seems the entire year’s migration must be going north,” Pandelume said. There were, she explained, about a dozen separate dragon populations, that traveled at widely separated intervals about the world. No one knew exactly how long it took for each herd to complete the circumnavigation, but it could perhaps be decades. Each of these populations broke up, as it went, into smaller herds, but all moved in the same general way; and this entire population, evidently, had diverted itself to the new northward path.
Drawing Deliamber aside, Valentine asked the Vroon whether his perceptions brought him any understanding. of these movements of the sea dragons. The little being’s many tentacles coiled intricately in the gesture that Valentine had long since come to interpret as a sign of distress; but all he would say was, “I feel the strength of them, and it is a very strong strength indeed. You know that they are not stupid animals.”
“I understand that a body of such size might well have a brain to match.”
“Such is the case. I reach forth and I feel their presence, and I sense great determination, great discipline. But what course it is that they are bound upon, my lord, I cannot tell you this day.”
> Valentine attempted to make light of the danger. “Sing me the ballad of Lord Malibor,” he told Carabella one evening as they all sat at table. She looked at him oddly, but he smiled and persisted, and at last she took up her pocket harp and struck up the roistering old tune:
Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea,
Lord Malibor came off the Mount,
A hunter for to be.
Lord Malibor prepared his ship,
A gallant sight was she,
With sails all of beaten gold,
And masts of ivory.
And Valentine, recalling the words now, joined in:
Lord Malibor stood at the helm
And faced the heaving wave,
And sailed in quest of the dragon free,
The dragon fierce and brave.
Lord Malibor a challenge called,
His voice did boom and ring,
“I wish to meet, I wish to fight,”
Quoth he, “the dragon-king.”
Tunigorn shifted about uncomfortably and swirled the wine in his bowl. “This song, I think, is unlucky, my lord,” he muttered.
“Fear nothing,” said Valentine. “Come, sing with us!”
“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.
Lord Malibor stood on the deck
And fought both hard and well.
Thick was the blood that flowed that day
And great the blows that fell.
The pilot Pandelume entered the mess-hall now, and approached the Coronal’s table, halting with a look of some bewilderment on her thick-furred fate as she heard the song. Valentine signaled her to join in, but her expression grew more gloomy, and she stood apart, scowling.
But dragon-kings are old and sly,
And rarely are they beaten.
Lord Malibor, for all his strength
Eventually was eaten.
All sailors bold, who dragons hunt
Of this grim tale take heed!
Despite all luck and skill, you may
End up as dragon feed
“What is it, Pandelume?” Valentine asked, as the last raucous verse died away.
“Dragons, my lord, approaching out of the south.”
“Many?”
“A great many, my lord.”
“You see?” Tunigorn burst out. “We have summoned them, with this foolish song!”
“Then we will sing them on their way,” said Valentine, “with another round of it.” And he began again:
Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea—
The new herd was several hundred strong—a vast assemblage of sea dragons, a swarm so huge it passed all belief, with nine great kings at the center of the herd. Valentine, remaining outwardly calm, nevertheless felt a powerful sense of menace and danger, so strong it was almost tangible, emanating from the creatures. But they went by, none coming within three miles of the fleet, and disappeared rapidly to the north, swimming with a weird intensity of purpose.
In the depths of the night, as Valentine lay sleeping with his mind as ever open to the guidance that only dreams can bring, a strange vision imposed itself upon his soul. In the midst of a broad plain studded with angular rocks and odd pockmarked stiff-armed leafless plants a great multitude of people moves with an easy floating gait toward a distant sea. He finds himself among them, clad as they are in flowing robes of some gauzy white fabric that billows of its own accord, there being no breeze whatsoever. None of the faces about him is a familiar one, and yet he does not think of himself as being among strangers: he knows he is closely bound to these people, that they have been his fellow pilgrims on some trek that had lasted for many months, possibly even for years. And now the trek is arriving at its destination.
There lies the sea, many-hued, sparkling, its surface shifting as if roiled by the movements of titanic creatures far below, or perhaps in response to the tug of the swollen amber moon that rests heavily upon the sky. At the shore mighty waves rise up like bright curving crystalline claws, and fall back in utter silence, flailing the shining beaches weight-lessly, as though they are not waves but merely the ghosts of waves. And farther out, beyond all turbulence, a dark ponderous shape looms in the water.
It is a sea dragon; it is the dragon called Lord Kinniken’s dragon, that is said to be the largest of all its kind, the king of the sea dragons, which no hunter’s harpoon has ever touched. From its great humped bony-ridged back there streams an irresistible radiance, a mysterious shimmering amethystine glow that fills the sky and stains the water a deep violet. And there is the sound of bells, huge and deep, ringing out a steady solemn peal, a dark clangor that threatens to split the world in two at the core.
The dragon swims inexorably shoreward, and its huge mouth gapes like the mouth of a cavern.
—My hour at last has come, says the king of dragons, and you are mine.
The pilgrims, caught, drawn, mesmerized by the rich pulsating light that streams from the dragon, float onward. toward the rim of the sea, toward that gaping mouth.
—Yes. Yes. Come to me. I am the water-king Maazmoorn, and you are mine!
Now the dragon-king has reached the shallows, and the waves part for him, and he moves with ease onto the beach. The pealing of the bells grows louder still: insistently that terrible sound conquers the atmosphere and presses down upon it, so that with each new tolling the air grows thicker, slower, warmer. The dragon-king has unfurled the pair of colossal winglike fins that sprout from thick fleshy bases behind his head, and the wings thrust him onward over the wet sand. As he pulls his ponderous form to land, the first pilgrims reach him and without hesitation float on into the titanic maw and disappear; and behind them come others, an unending procession of willing sacrifices, racing forward to meet the dragon-king as he lurches landward to take them in.
And they enter the great mouth, and are engulfed into it, and Valentine is among them, and he goes down deep into the pit of the dragon’s stomach. He enters a vaulted chamber of infinite size, and finds it already occupied by the legion of the swallowed, millions, billions—humans and Skandars and Vroons and Hjorts and Liimen and Su-Suheris and Ghayrogs, all the many peoples of Majipoor, impartially caught up in the gullet of the dragon-king.
And still Maazmoorn goes forward, deeper upon the land, and still the dragon-king feeds. He swallows all the world, gulping and gulping and still more ravenously gulping, devouring cities and mountains, the continents and the seas, taking within himself the totality of Majipoor, until at last he has taken it all, and lies coiled around the planet like a swollen serpent that has eaten some enormous globular creature.
The bells ring out a paean of triumph.
—Now at last has my kingdom come!
After the dream had left him Valentine did not return to full wakefulness, but allowed himself to drift into middlesleep, the place of sensitive receptivity, and there he lay, calm, quiet, reliving the dream, entering again that all-devouring mouth, analyzing, attempting to interpret.
Then the first light of morning fell upon him, and he came up to consciousness. Carabella lay beside him, awake, watching him. He slipped his arm about her shoulder and let his hand rest fondly, playfully, on her breast.
“Was it a sending?” she asked.
“No, I felt no presence of the Lady, nor of the King.” He smiled. “You know always when I dream, don’t you?”
“I could see the dream come upon you. Your eyes moved beneath the lids; your lip twitched; your nostrils moved like those of some hunting animal.”
“Did I look troubled?”
“No, not at all. Perhaps at first you frowned; but then you smiled in your sleep, and a great calmness came over you, as if you were going forth toward some preordained fate and you accepted it entirely.” He laughed. “Ah, then I’ll be gulped again by a sea dr
agon!”
“Is that what you dreamed?”
“More or less. Not the way it actually happened, though. This was the Kinniken dragon coming up on shore, and I marched right down its gullet. As did everyone else in the world, I think. And then it ate the world as well.”
“And can you speak your dream?” she asked.
“In patches and fragments only,” he said. “The wholeness of it still eludes me.”
It was too simple, he knew, to call the dream merely a replaying of an event of his past, as though he had plugged in an entertainment cube and seen a reenactment of that strange event of his exile years, when he had indeed been swallowed by a sea dragon, after being shipwrecked off the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and Lisamon Hultin, swallowed up in that same gulp, had cut a path to freedom through the monster’s blubber-walled gut. Even a child knew better than to take a dream at its most literal autobiographical level.
But nothing yielded itself to him on the deeper level, either, except an interpretation so obvious as to be trivial: that these movements of sea-dragon herds he had lately observed were yet another warning that the world was in danger, that some potent force threatened the stability of society. That much he knew already, and it needed no reinforcement. Why sea dragons, though? What metaphor was churning in his mind that had transformed those vast marine mammals into a world-swallowing menace?
Carabella said, “Perhaps you look too hard. Let it pass, and the meaning will come to you when your mind is turned to something else. What do you say? Shall we go on deck?”
* * *
They saw no more herds of dragons in the days that followed, only a few solitary stragglers, and then none at all, nor were Valentine’s dreams invaded again by threatening images. The sea was calm, the sky was bright and fair, the wind stood them well from the east. Valentine spent much of his time alone on the foredeck, looking off to sea; and at last came the day when out of the emptiness there suddenly came into view, like a bright white shield springing out of the dark horizon, the dazzling chalk cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, the holiest and most peaceful place of Majipoor, the sanctuary of the compassionate Lady.
Valentine Pontifex Page 17
