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  Lord Valentine's Castle

  ( Majipoor - 1 )

  Robert Silverberg

  On Majipoor — an immense world teeming with alien races and fantastic magical machinery, a certain Valentine wakes up one morning with only a vague and troubled idea of who he is. His dreams suggest he is the ruler of Majipoor — but no one believes him… so far.

  Lord Valentine’s Castle

  by Robert Silverberg

  I

  The Book of the King of Dreams

  —1—

  AND THEN, AFTER WALKING all day through a golden haze of humid warmth that gathered about him like fine wet fleece, Valentine came to a great ridge of outcropping white stone overlooking the city of Pidruid. It was the provincial capital, sprawling and splendid, the biggest city he had come upon since — since? — the biggest in a long while of wandering, at any rate.

  There he halted, finding a seat at the edge of the soft, crumbling white ridge, digging his booted feet into the flaking ragged stone, and he sat there staring down at Pidruid, blinking as though newly out of sleep. On this summer day twilight was still some hours away, and the sun hung high to the southwest beyond Pidruid, out over the Great Sea. I will rest here for a while, Valentine thought, and then I will go down into Pidruid and find lodging for the night.

  As he rested he heard pebbles tumbling past him from a higher point on the ridge. Unhurriedly he looked back the way he had come. A young herdsman had appeared, a boy with straw-colored hair and a freckled face, leading a train of fifteen or twenty mounts down the hill road. They were fat sleek purple-skinned beasts, obviously well looked after. The boy’s own mount looked older and less plump, a wise and toughened creature.

  "Hoy!" he called down to Valentine. "Where are you bound?"

  "Pidruid. And you?"

  "The same. Bringing these mounts to market. Thirsty work it is, too. Do you have wine?"

  "Some," Valentine said. He tapped the flask at his hip, where a fiercer man might wear a weapon. "Good red mid-country wine. I’ll be sorry to see the last of it."

  "Give me a drink and I’ll let you ride into town with me."

  "Done," said Valentine.

  He got to his feet as the boy dismounted and scrambled down the ridge toward him. Valentine offered him the flask. The boy was no more than fourteen or fifteen, he guessed, and small for his age, though deep through the chest and brawny. He came hardly elbow-high to Valentine, who was tall but not unusually so, a sturdy man just above middle height, with wide flat shoulders and big capable hands.

  The boy swirled the wine in the flask, inhaled in a knowing way, nodded his approval, took a deep gulp, sighed. "I’ve been eating dust all the way from Falkynkip! And this sticky heat — it chokes you! Another dry hour and I’d have been a dead one." He returned the wine to Valentine. "You live in town?"

  Valentine frowned. "No."

  "Here for the festival, then?"

  "Festival?"

  "You don’t know?"

  Valentine shook his head. He felt the pressure of the boy’s bright, mocking eyes, and was confused. "I’ve been traveling. I haven’t followed the news. Is this festival time in Pidruid?"

  "This week it is," said the boy. "Beginning on Starday. The grand parade, the circus, the royal celebration. Look down there. Don’t you see him entering the city even now?"

  He pointed. Valentine sighted along the boy’s outstretched arm and squinted, peering at Pidruid’s southern corner, but all he saw was a jumble of green-tiled rooftops and a tangle of ancient streets following no rational plan. Again he shook his head. "There," the boy said impatiently. "Down by the harbor. See? The ships? The five tremendous ones, with his banner flying from the rigging? And there’s the procession, coming through Dragon Gate, just beginning to march Black Highway. I think that’s his chariot, coming up now by the Arch of Dreams. Don’t you see? Is there something wrong with your eyes?"

  "I don’t know the city," said Valentine mildly. "But yes, I see the harbor, the five ships."

  "Good. Now follow along inland a little way — the big stone gate? And the wide highway running through it? And that ceremonial arch, just this side of—"

  "I see it now, yes."

  "And his banner over the chariot?"

  "Whose banner? If I sound dim, forgive me, but—"

  "Whose? Whose? Lord Valentine’s banner! Lord Valentine’s chariot! Lord Valentine’s bodyguard marching through the streets of Pidruid! Don’t you know the Coronal has arrived?"

  "I didn’t."

  "And the festival! Why do you think there’s a festival at this time of summer, if not to welcome the Coronal?"

  Valentine smiled. "I’ve been traveling and I haven’t followed the news. Would you like more wine?"

  "There’s not much left," the boy said.

  "Go on. Finish it. I’ll buy more in Pidruid."

  He handed over the flask and turned toward the city again, letting his gaze travel down the slope and across the woodsy suburbs to the dense and teeming city, and outward toward the waterfront, and to the great ships, the banners, the marching warriors, the chariot of the Coronal. This must be a great moment in the history of Pidruid, for the Coronal ruled from far-off Castle Mount, all the way on the other side of the world, so distant that he and it were almost legendary, distances being what they were on this world of Majipoor. Coronals of Majipoor did not come often to the western continent. But Valentine was oddly unmoved by the knowledge of the presence of his glittering namesake down below there. I am here and the Coronal is here, he thought, and he will sleep tonight in some splendid palace of the masters of Pidruid, and I will sleep in some pile of hay, and then there will be a grand festival, and what is that to me? He felt almost apologetic, being so placid in the face of the boy’s excitement. It was a discourtesy.

  He said, "Forgive me. I know so little of what’s been happening in the world these past months. Why is the Coronal here?"

  "He makes the grand processional," said the boy. "To every part of the realm, to mark his coming to power. This is the new one, you know. Lord Valentine, only two years on his throne. The brother to Lord Voriax who died. You knew that, that Lord Voriax was dead, that Lord Valentine was our Coronal?"

  "I had heard," said Valentine vaguely.

  "Well, that’s he, down there in Pidruid. Touring the realm for the first time since he got the Castle. He’s been down south all month, in the jungle provinces, and yesterday he sailed up the coast to Pidruid, and tonight he enters the city, and in a few days there’ll be the festival, and food and drink for everyone, games, dancing, delights, a great market too, where I’ll sell these animals for a fortune. Afterward he travels overland through the whole continent of Zimroel, from capital to capital, a journey of so many thousands of miles it makes my head ache to think of it, and from the eastern shore he’ll sail back to Alhanroel and Castle Mount, and none of us in Zimroel will see him again for twenty years or more. A fine thing it must be to be Coronal!" The boy laughed. "That was good wine. My name’s Shanamir. What’s yours?"

  "Valentine."

  "Valentine? Valentine? An auspicious name!"

  "A common one, I’m afraid."

  "Put Lord in front of it and you’d be the Coronal!"

  "It’s not as easy as that. Besides, why would I want to be Coronal?"

  "The power," said Shanamir, wide-eyed. "The fine clothes, the food, the wine, the jewels, the palaces, the women—"

  "The responsibility," Valentine said somberly. "The burden. Do you think a Coronal does nothing but drink golden wine and march in grand processions? Do you think he’s put there just to enjoy himself?"

  The boy considered. "Perhaps not."

  "He rules over b
illions upon billions of people, across territories so huge we can’t comprehend them. Everything falls on his shoulders. To carry out the decrees of the Pontifex, to sustain order, to support justice in every land — it tires me to think of it, boy. He keeps the world from collapsing into chaos. I don’t envy him. Let him have the job."

  Shanamir said, after a moment, "You’re not as stupid as I first thought, Valentine."

  "Did you think I was stupid, then?"

  "Well, simple. Easy of mind. Here you are a grown man, and you seem to know so little of certain things, and I half your age and I have to explain. But perhaps I misjudge you. Shall we go down into Pidruid?"

  —2—

  VALENTINE HAD HIS PICK of the mounts the boy was taking to market; but they all seemed alike to him, and after making a pretense of choosing he picked one at random, vaulting lightly into the creature’s natural saddle. It was good to ride, after so long on foot. The mount was comfortable, as well it might be, for they had been bred for comfort for thousands of years, these artificial animals, these witchcraft-creatures out of the old days, strong and tireless and patient, able to convert any sort of trash into food. The skill of making them was long forgotten, but now they bred of themselves, like natural animals, and it would be a slow business getting about on Majipoor without them.

  The road to Pidruid led along the high ridge for more than a mile, then began sudden sharp switchbacks down into the coastal plain. Valentine let the boy do most of the talking as they made the descent. Shanamir came, he said, from a district two and a half days’ journey inland, to the northeast; there he and his brothers and his father raised mounts for sale at Pidruid market, and turned a good living at it; he was thirteen years old, and had a high opinion of himself; he had never been outside the province of which Pidruid was the capital, but someday he meant to go abroad, to travel everywhere on Majipoor, to make the pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep and kneel before the Lady, to cross the Inner Sea to Alhanroel and achieve the ascent of Castle Mount, even to go down south, maybe, beyond the steaming tropics, into the burnt and barren domain of the King of Dreams, for what was the use of being alive and healthy on a world as full of wonders as Majipoor if you did not journey hither and thither about on it?

  "And you, Valentine?" he asked suddenly. "Who are you, where from, whither bound?"

  Valentine was caught by surprise, lulled by the boy’s prattle and the steady gentle rhythm of the mount as it padded down the broad twisting road, and the burst of jabbing questions left him unprepared. He said only, "I come from the eastern provinces. I have no plans beyond Pidruid. I’ll stay here until I have reason to leave."

  "Why have you come?"

  "Why not?"

  "Ah," said Shanamir. "All right. I know purposeful evasion when I hear it. You’re the younger son of a duke in Ni-moya or Piliplok, and you sent someone a mischievous dream and were caught at it, and your father gave you a pouch of money and told you to vanish to the far side of the continent. Right?"

  "Precisely," Valentine said, with a wink.

  "And you’re loaded with royals and crowns and you’re going to set yourself up like a prince in Pidruid and drink and dance until your last coin is gone, and then you’ll hire aboard a seagoing vessel and ship out for Alhanroel, and you’ll take me with you as your squire. Isn’t that so?"

  "You have it exactly, my friend. Except for the money. I neglected to provide for that part of your fantasy."

  "But you have some money," said Shanamir, not so playfully now. "You aren’t a beggar, are you? They’re very hard on beggars in Pidruid. They don’t allow any sort of vagrancy down there."

  "I have a few coins," Valentine said. "Enough to carry me through festival time and a bit beyond. And then I’ll see."

  "If you do go to sea, take me with you, Valentine!"

  "If I do, I will," he promised.

  They were halfway down the slope now. The city of Pidruid lay in a great basin along the coast, rimmed by low gray hills on the inland side and along much of the shore, save only where a break in the outer range allowed the ocean to spill through, forming a blue-green bay that was Pidruid’s magnificent harbor. As he approached sea level here in late afternoon Valentine felt the offshore breezes blowing toward him, cool, fragrant, breaking the heat. Already white shoals of fog were rolling toward the shore out of the west, and there was a salty tang to the air, thick as it was now with water that had embraced the fishes and sea-dragons only hours before. Valentine was awed by the size of the city that lay before him. He could not remember ever having seen a larger one; but there was so much, after all, that he could not remember.

  This was the edge of the continent. All of Zimroel lay at his back, and for all he knew he had walked it from end to end, from one of the eastern ports indeed, Ni-moya or Piliplok, except that he knew himself to be a young man, not very young but young enough, and he doubted that it was possible to have made such a journey on foot in one lifetime, and he had no recollection of having been on any sort of mount until this afternoon. On the other hand, he seemed to know how to ride, he had lifted himself knowledgeably into the beast’s broad saddle, and that argued that he must have ridden at least part of the way before. It did not matter. He was here now, and he felt no restlessness; since Pidruid was where he had somehow arrived, Pidruid was where he would stay, until there was reason to go elsewhere. He lacked Shanamir’s hunger for travel. The world was so big it did not bear thinking about, three great continents, two enormous seas, a place that one could comprehend fully only in dreams, and even then not bring much of the truth of it away into the waking world. They said this Lord Valentine the Coronal lived in a castle eight thousand years old, with five rooms for every year of its existence, and that the castle sat upon a mountain so tall it pierced the sky, a colossal peak thirty miles high, on whose slopes were fifty cities as big as Pidruid. Such a thing as that did not bear much thought either. The world was too big, too old, too populous for one man’s mind. I will live in this city of Pidruid, Valentine thought, and I will find a way to pay for my food and lodging, and I will be happy.

  "Naturally you don’t have a bed reserved in an inn," Shanamir said.

  "Of course not."

  "It stands to reason you wouldn’t. And naturally everything in town is full, this being festival time and the Coronal already here. So where will you sleep, Valentine?"

  "Anywhere. Under a tree. On a mound of rags. In the public park. That looks like a park there, over to the right, that stretch of green with the tall trees."

  "You remember what I told you about vagrants in Pidruid? They’ll find you and lock you deep for a month, and when they let you out they’ll have you sweeping dung until you can buy your way out of your fine, which at the pay of a dung-sweeper will take you the rest of your life."

  "At least dung-sweeping’s steady work," Valentine said.

  Shanamir didn’t laugh. "There’s an inn the mount-sellers stay at. I’m known there, or rather my father is. We’ll get you in somehow. But what would you have done without me?"

  "Become a dung-sweeper, I suppose."

  "You sound as though you really wouldn’t mind." The boy touched his mount’s ear, halting it, and looked closely at him. "Doesn’t anything matter to you, Valentine? I don’t understand you. Are you a fool, or simply the most carefree man on Majipoor?"

  "I wish I knew," said Valentine.

  At the foot of the hill the ridge road joined with a grand highway that came running down out of the north and curved westward toward Pidruid. The new road, wide and straight along the valley floor, was rimmed with low white markers stamped with the double crest of Pontifex and Coronal, the labyrinth and the starburst, and was paved in smooth blue-gray stuff of light resiliency, a springy, flawless roadbed that probably was of great antiquity, as were so many of the best things of this world. The mounts plodded tirelessly. Synthetic things that they were, they scarcely understood fatigue, and would clop from Pidruid to Piliplok without resting and without com
plaining. From time to time Shanamir glanced back, checking for strays, since the beasts were not tied; but they remained blandly in their places, one after another, blunt snout of one close behind coarse ropy tail of another, along the flank of the highway.

  Now the sun was faintly tinged with late-day bronze, and the city lay close before them. A stunning sight presented itself in this part of the road: on both shoulders of it had been planted noble trees, twenty times the height of a man, with slim tapering trunks of dark bluish bark and mighty crowns of glistening greenish-black leaves sharp as daggers. Out of those crowns burst astounding clusters of bloom, red tipped with yellow, that blazed like beacons as far as Valentine could see.

  "What are those trees?" he asked.

  "Fireshower palms," Shanamir said. "Pidruid is famous for them. They grow only near the coast and flower just one week a year. In the winter they drop sour berries, that make a strong liquor. You’ll drink it tomorrow."

  "The Coronal has picked a good moment to come here, then."

  "Not by chance, I imagine."

  On and on the twin column of brilliant trees stretched, and they followed along, until open fields yielded to the first country villas, and then suburban tracts thick with more modest homes, and then a dusty zone of small factories, and finally the ancient wall of Pidruid itself, half as high as a fireshower tree, pierced by a pointed arch set with archaic-looking battlements. "Falkynkip Gate," Shanamir announced. "The eastern entrance to Pidruid. Now we enter the capital. Eleven million souls here, Valentine, and all the races of Majipoor to be found, not just humans, no, everything here, all mixed together, Skandars and Hjorts and Liimen and all the rest. Even, so they say, a little group of Shapeshifters."

  "Shapeshifters?"

  "The old race. The first natives."

  "We call them something else," Valentine said vaguely. "Metamorphs, is it?"