Valentine Pontifex Read online

  “I think I never will truly accept it,” she said distantly.

  “Lady of my life, how can you say—”

  “You know why, Valentine.”

  He closed his eyes a moment. “I tell you again, Carabella, you are beloved on the Mount by every knight, every prince, every lord—you have their devotion, their admiration, their respect, their—”

  “I have Elidath’s, yes. And Tunigorn’s, and Stasilaine’s, and others of that kind. Those who truly love you love me also. But to many of the others I remain an upstart, a commoner, an intruder, an accident—a concubine—”

  “Which others?”

  “You know them, Valentine.”

  “Which others?”

  “Divvis,” she said, after some hesitation. “And the little lords and knights in Divvis’s faction. And others. The Duke of Halanx spoke mockingly of me to one of my own ladies-in-waiting—Halanx, Valentine, your native city! Prince Manganot of Banglecode. And there are more.” She turned to him, and he saw the anguish in her dark eyes. “Am I imagining these things? Am I hearing whispers where it’s only the rustling of the leaves? Oh, Valentine, sometimes I think that they’re right, that a Coronal should not have married a commoner. I’m not one of them. I never will be. My lord, I must be so much grief for you—”

  “You are joy to me, and nothing other than joy. Ask Sleet what my mood was like last week when I was in the Labyrinth, and how I’ve been since you joined me on this journey. Ask Shanamir—Tunigorn—anyone, anyone at all—”

  “I know, love. You looked so dark, so grim the day I arrived. I barely recognized you, with that frown, with those glowering eyes.”

  “A few days with you heals me of anything.”

  “And yet I think you are still not yourself entirely. Is it that you still have the Labyrinth too much with you? Or perhaps it’s the desert that’s depressing you. Or the rums.”

  “No, I think not.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He studied the landscape beyond the floater window, noting its increasing greenness, the gradual encroachment of trees and grass as the terrain grew more hilly. That should have cheered him more than it did. But there was a weight on his soul that he could not shed.

  After a moment he said, “The dream, Carabella—that vision, that omen—there’s no way I can rid my mind of that. Ah, what a page I’ll have in history! The Coronal who lost his throne and became a juggler, and got back his throne, and afterward governed foolishly, and allowed the world to collapse into chaos and madness—ah, Carabella, Carabella, is that what I’m doing? After fourteen thousand years, am I to be the last Coronal? Will there be anyone even to write my history, do you think?”

  “You have never governed foolishly, Valentine.”

  “Am I not too gentle, too even-tempered, too eager to see both sides of an issue?”

  “Those are not faults.”

  “Sleet thinks they are. Sleet feels that my dread of warfare, of any sort of violence, leads me on the wrong path. He’s told me so in almost so many words.”

  “But there’ll be no warfare, my lord.”

  “That dream—”

  “I think you take that dream too literally.”

  “No,” he said. “Such talk gives me only idle comfort. Tisana and Deliamber agree with me that we stand on the brink of some great calamity, perhaps a war. And Sleet: he’s convinced of it. He’s made up his mind that it’s the Metamorphs who are about to rise against us, the holy war that they’ve been planning, he says, for seven thousand years.”

  “Sleet is too bloodthirsty. And he has had an irrational fear of Shapeshifters since he was a young man. You know that.”

  “When we recaptured the Castle eight years ago and found it full of disguised Metamorphs, was that just a delusion?”

  “What they tried to do back then ultimately failed, did it not?”

  “And will they never try again?”

  “If your policies succeed, Valentine—”

  “My policies! What policies? I reach toward the Metamorphs and they slide beyond my grasp! You know that I hoped to have half a dozen Metamorph chieftains by my side when we toured Velalisier last week. So that they could observe how we’ve restored their sacred city, and see the treasures we’ve found, and perhaps take the holiest objects with them back to Piurifayne. But I had no response from them, not even a refusal, Carabella.”

  “You were aware that the Velalisier excavations might create complications. Perhaps they resent our even entering the place, let alone trying to put it back together. Isn’t there a legend that they plan to rebuild it themselves some day?”

  “Yes,” said Valentine somberly. “After they’ve regained control of Majipoor and driven us all from their world. So Ermanar once told me. All right: maybe inviting them to Velalisier was a mistake. But they’ve ignored all my other overtures, too. I write to their queen the Danipiur in Ilinvoyne, and if she replies at all, it’s in letters of three sentences, cold, formal, empty—” He drew in his breath deeply. “Enough of all this misery, Carabella! There’ll be no war. I’ll find a way to break through the hatred the Shapeshifters feel for us, and win them to my side. And as for the lords of the Mount who’ve been snubbing you, if indeed they have—I beg you, ignore them. Snub them back! What is a Divvis to you, or a Duke of Halanx? Fools, is all they are.” Valentine smiled. “I’ll soon give them worse things to worry about, love, than my consort’s pedigree!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they object to having a commoner for the Coronal’s consort,” said Valentine, “how will they feel when they have a commoner for their Coronal?”

  Carabella looked at him in bewilderment. “I understand none of this, Valentine.”

  “You will. In time, you’ll understand all. I mean to work such changes in the world—oh, love, when they write the history of my reign, if Majipoor survives long enough for that history to be written, they’ll need more than one volume for it, I promise you! I will do such things—such earthshaking things—” He laughed. “What do you think, Carabella? Listen to me ranting! The good Lord Valentine of the gentle soul turns the world upside down! Can he do it? Can he actually bring it off?”

  “My lord, you mystify me. You speak in riddles.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “You give me no clue to the answer.”

  He said, after a moment’s pause, “The answer to the riddle, Carabella, is Hissune.”

  “Hissune? Your little Labyrinth urchin?”

  “An urchin no longer. A weapon, now, which I have hurled toward the Castle.”

  She sighed. “Riddles and still more riddles!”

  “It’s a royal privilege to speak in mysteries.” Valentine winked and pulled her toward him, and brushed his lips lightly against hers. “Allow me this little indulgence. And—”

  The floater came suddenly to a halt.

  “Hoy, look! We’ve arrived!” he cried. “There’s Nascimonte! And—by the Lady, I think he’s got half his province out here to greet us!”

  The caravan had pulled up in a broad meadow of short dense grass so dazzlingly green it seemed some other color altogether, some unworldly hue from the far end of the spectrum. Under the brilliant midday sun a great celebration was already in progress that might have stretched for miles, tens of thousands of people holding carnival as far as the eye could see. To the booming sound of cannons and the shrill jangling melodies of sistirons and double-chorded galistanes, volley after volley of day-fireworks rose overhead, sketching stunning hard-edged patterns in black and violet against the clear bright sky. Stilt walkers twenty feet tall, wearing huge clown-masks with swollen red foreheads and gigantic noses, frolicked through the crowd. Great posts had been erected from which starburst banners rippled joyously in the light summer breeze; half a dozen orchestras at once, on half a dozen different bandstands, burst loose with anthems and marches and chorales; and a veritable army of jugglers had been assembled, probably anyone in six hundred leagues
who had the slightest skill, so that the air was thick with clubs and knives and hatchets and blazing torches and gaily colored balls and a hundred other sorts of objects, flying back and forth in tribute to Lord Valentine’s beloved pastime. After the gloom and murk of the Labyrinth, this was the most splendid imaginable recommencement of the grand processional: frantic, overwhelming, a trifle ridiculous, altogether delightful.

  In the midst of it all, waiting calmly near the place where the caravan of floaters had come to rest, was a tall, gaunt man of late middle years, whose eyes were bright with a strange intensity and whose hard-featured face was set in the most benevolent of smiles. This was Nascimonte, landowner turned bandit turned landowner again, once self-styled Duke of Vornek Crag and Overlord of the Western Marches, now by proclamation of Lord Valentine more properly ennobled with the title of Duke of Ebersinul.

  “Oh, will you look!” Carabella cried, struggling to get the words out through her laughter. “He’s wearing his bandit costume for us!”

  Valentine nodded, grinning.

  When first he had encountered Nascimonte, in the forlorn nameless ruins of some Metamorph city in the desert southwest of the Labyrinth, the highwayman duke was decked out in a bizarre jacket and leggings fashioned from the thick red fur of some ratty little desert creature, and a preposterous yellow fur cap. That was when, bankrupted and driven from his estates by the callous destructiveness of the followers of the false Lord Valentine as they passed through this region while the usurper was making his grand processional, Nascimonte had taken up the practice of robbing wayfarers in the desert. Now his lands were his own again, and he could dress, if he chose, in silks and velvets, and array himself with amulets and feather-masks and eye-jewels, but there he was in the same scruffy absurd garb he had favored during his time of exile. Nascimonte had always been a man of great style: and, Valentine thought, such a nostalgic choice of raiment on such a day as this was nothing if not a show of style.

  It was years since last Valentine and Nascimonte had met. Unlike most of those who had fought beside Valentine in the final days of the war of restoration, Nascimonte had not cared to accept an appointment to the Coronal’s councils on Castle Mount, but had wanted only to return to his ancestral land in the foothills of Mount Ebersinul, just above Lake Ivory. Which had been difficult to achieve, since title to the land had passed legitimately to others since Nascimonte’s illegitimate losing of it; but the government of Lord Valentine had devoted much time in the early years of the restoration to such puzzles, and eventually Nascimonte had regained all that had been his.

  Valentine wanted nothing more than to rush from his floater and embrace his old comrade-at-arms. But of course protocol forbade that: he could not simply plunge into this wild crowd as though he were just an ordinary free citizen.

  Instead he had to wait while the ponderous ceremony of the arraying of the Coronal’s guard took place: the great burly shaggy Skandar, Zalzan Kavol, who was the chief of his guards, shouting and waving his four arms officiously about, and the men and women in their impressive green-and-gold uniforms emerging from their floaters and forming a living enifilade to hold back the gaping populace, and the royal musicians setting up the royal anthem, and much more like that, until at last Sleet and Tunigorn came to the royal floater and opened its royal doors to allow the Coronal and his consort to step forth into the golden warmth of the day.

  And then at last, to walk between the double rows of guards with Carabella on his arm to a point halfway toward Nascimonte, and there to wait while the Duke advanced, and bowed and made the starburst gesture, and most solemnly bowed again to Carabella—

  And Valentine laughed and came forward and took the gaunt old bandit into his arms, and held him tight, and then they marched together through the parting crowd toward the reviewing stand that surmounted the festival.

  Now began a grand parade of the kind customary to a visit of the Coronal, with musicians and jugglers and acrobats and tandy-prancers and clowns and wild animals of the most terrifying aspect, which were not in fact wild at all, but carefully bred for tameness; and along with these performers came all the general citizenry, marching in a kind of glorious random way, crying out as they passed the stand, “Valentine! Valentine! Lord Valentine!”

  And the Coronal smiled, and waved, and applauded, and otherwise did what a Coronal on processional must do, which is to radiate joy and cheer and a sense of the wholeness of the world. This he found now to be unexpectedly difficult work, for all the innate sunniness of his nature: the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in the Labyrinth still shadowed him with inexplicable despond. But his training prevailed, and he smiled, and waved, and applauded for hours.

  The afternoon passed and the festive mood ebbed, for even in the presence of the Coronal how can people cheer and salute with the same intensity for hour after hour? After the rush of excitement came the part Valentine liked least, when he saw in the eyes of those about him that intense probing curiosity, and he was reminded that a king is a freak, a sacred monster, incomprehensible and even terrifying to those who know him only as a title, a crown, an ermine robe, a place in history. That part, too, had to be endured, until at last all the parade had gone by, and the din of merrymaking had given way to the quieter sound of a wearying crowd, and the bronze shadows lengthened, and the air grew cool.

  “Shall we go now to my home, lordship?” Nascimonte asked.

  “I think it is time,” said Valentine.

  Nascimonte’s manor-house proved to be a bizarre and wonderful structure that lay against an outcropping of pink granite like some vast featherless flying creature briefly halting to rest. In truth it was nothing more than a tent, but a tent of such size and strangeness as Valentine had never imagined. Some thirty or forty lofty poles upheld great outswooping wings of taut dark cloth that rose to startling steep peaks, then subsided almost to ground level, and went climbing again at sharp angles to form the chamber adjoining. It seemed as though the house could be disassembled in an hour and moved to some other hillside; and yet there was great strength and majesty to it, a paradoxical look of permanence and solidity within its airiness and lightness.

  Inside, that look of permanence and solidity was manifest, for thick carpeting in the Milimorn style, dark green shot through with scarlet, had been woven to the underside of the roof canvas to give it a rich, vivid texture, and the heavy tentpoles were banded with glittering metal, and the flooring was of pale violet slate, cut thin and buffed to a keen polish. The furnishings were simple—divans, long massive tables, some old-fashioned armoires and chests, and not much else, but everything sturdy and in its way regal.

  “Is this house anything like the one the usurper’s men torched?” Valentine asked, when he was alone with Nascimonte a short while after they had entered.

  “In construction, identical in all respects, my lord. The original, you know, was designed by the first and greatest Nascimonte, six hundred years ago. When we rebuilt, we used the old plans, and altered nothing. I reclaimed some of the furnishings from the creditors and duplicated the others. The plantation too—everything is just as it was before they came and carried out their drunken wrecking. The dam has been rebuilt, the fields have been drained, the fruit trees replanted: five years of constant toil, and now at last the havoc of that awful week is undone. All of which I owe to you, my lord. You have made me whole again—you have made all the world whole again—”

  “And so may it remain, I pray.”

  “And so it shall, my lord.”

  “Ah, do you think so, Nascimonte? Do you think we are out of our troubles yet?”

  “My lord, what troubles?” Nascimonte lightly touched the Coronal’s arm, and led him to a broad porch from which there was a magnificent prospect of all his property. By the twilight glow and the soft radiance of drifting yellow glowfloats tethered in the trees, Valentine saw a long sweep of lawn leading down to elegantly maintained fields and gardens, and beyond it the serene crescent of Lake Ivo
ry, on whose bright surface the many peaks and crags of Mount Ebersinul, dominating the scene, were indistinctly mirrored. There was the faint sound of distant music, the twanging of gardolans, perhaps, and some voices raised in the last gentle songs of the long festal afternoon. All was peace and prosperity out there. “When you look upon this, my lord, can you believe that trouble exists in the world?”

  “I take your point, old friend. But there is more to the world than what we can see from your porch.”

  “It is the most peaceful of worlds, my lord.”

  “So it has been, for thousands of years. But how much longer will that long peace endure?”

  Nascimonte stared, as though seeing Valentine for the first time that day.

  “My lord?”

  “Do I sound gloomy, Nascimonte?”

  “I’ve never seen you so somber, my lord. I could almost believe that the trick has been played again, that a false Valentine has been substituted for the one I knew.”

  With a thin smile Valentine said, “I am the true Valentine. But a very tired one, I think.”

  “Come, I’ll show you to your chamber, and there will be dinner when you’re ready, a quiet one, only my family and a few guests from town, no more than twenty at the most, and thirty more of your people—”

  “That sounds almost intimate, after the Labyrinth,” said Valentine lightly.

  He followed Nascimonte through the dark and mysterious windings of the manor-house to a wing set apart on the high eastern arm of the cliff. Here, behind a formidable barricade of Skandar guards that included Zalzan Kayo himself, was the royal suite. Valentine, bidding his host farewell, entered and found Carabella alone within, stretched languidly in a sunken tub of delicate blue and gold Ni-moyan tile, her slender body dimly visible beneath a curious crackling haze at the surface of the water.

  “This is astonishing!” she said. “You ought to come in with me, Valentine.”

  “Most gladly I will, lady!”