Valentine Pontifex Read online

  He kicked off his boots, peeled away his doublet, tossed his tunic aside, and with a grateful sigh slipped into the tub beside her. The water was effervescent, almost electrical, and now that he was in it he saw a faint glow playing over its surface. Closing his eyes, he stretched back and put his head against the smooth tiled rim, and curled his arm around Carabella to draw her against him. Lightly he kissed her forehead, and then, as she turned toward him, the briefly exposed tip of one small round breast.

  “What have they put in the water?” he asked.

  “It comes from a natural spring. The chamberlain called it ‘radioactivity.’”

  “I doubt that,” said Valentine. “Radioactivity is something else, something very powerful and dangerous. I’ve studied it, so I believe.”

  “What is it like, if not like this?”

  “I can’t say. The Divine be blessed, we have none of it on Majipoor, whatever it may be. But if we did, I think we’d not be taking baths in it. This must be some lively kind of mineral water.”

  “Very likely,” Carabella said.

  They bathed together in silence awhile. Valentine felt the vitality returning to his spirit. The tingling water? The comforting presence of Carabella close by, and the freedom at last from the press of courtiers and followers and admirers and petitioners and cheering citizens? Yes, and yes, those things could only help to bring him back from his brooding, and also his innate resilience must be manifesting itself at last, drawing him forth from that strange and un-Valentine-like darkness that had oppressed him since entering the Labyrinth. He smiled. Carabella lifted her lips to his; and his hands slipped down the sleekness of her lithe body, to her lean muscular midsection, to the strong supple muscles of her thighs.

  “In the bath?” she asked dreamily.

  “Why not? This water is magical.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  She floated above him. Her legs straddled him; her eyes, half open, met his for a moment, then closed. Valentine caught her taut little buttocks and guided her against him. Was it ten years, he wondered, since that first night in Pidruid, in that moonlit glade, under the high gray-green bushes, after the festival for that other Lord Valentine? Hard to imagine: ten years. And the excitement of her had never waned for him. He locked his arms about her, and they moved in rhythms that had grown familiar but never routine, and he ceased to think of that first time or of all the times since, or of anything, indeed, but warmth and love and happiness.

  Afterward, as they dressed for Nascimonte’s intimate dinner for fifty guests, she said, “Are you serious about making Hissune Coronal?”

  “What?”

  “I think that that surely was the meaning of what you were saying earlier—those riddles of yours, just as we arrived at the festival, do you recall?”

  “I recall,” Valentine said.

  “If you prefer not to discuss—”

  “No. No. I see no reason to hide this matter from you any longer.”

  “So you are serious!”

  Valentine frowned. “I think he could be Coronal, yes. It’s a thought that first crossed my mind when he was just a dirty little boy hustling for crowns and royals in the Labyrinth.”

  “But can an ordinary person become Coronal?”

  “You, Carabella, who were a street-juggler, and are now consort to the Coronal, can ask that?”

  “You fell in love with me and made a rash and unusual choice. Which has not been accepted, as you know, by everyone.”

  “Only by a few foolish lordlings! You’re hailed by all the rest of the world as my true lady.”

  “Perhaps. But in my case the consort is not the Coronal. And the common people will never accept one of their own as Coronal. To them the Coronal is royal, sacred, almost divine. So I felt, when I was down there among them, in my former life.”

  “You are accepted. He will be accepted too.”

  “It seems so arbitrary—picking a boy out of nowhere, raising him to such a height. Why not Sleet? Zalzan Kavol? Anyone at random?”

  “Hissune has the capacity. That I know.”

  “I am no judge of that. But the idea that that ragged little boy will wear the crown seems terribly strange to me, too strange even to be something out of a dream.”

  “Does the Coronal always have to come from the same narrow clique on Castle Mount? That’s how it’s been; yes, for hundreds of years—thousands, perhaps. The Coronal always selected from one of the great families of the Mount: or even when he is not of one of those, and I could not just now tell you when we last went outside the Mount for the choice, he has been highborn, invariably, the son of princes and dukes. I think that was not how our system was originally designed, or else why are we forbidden to have hereditary monarchs? And now such vast problems are coming to the surface, Carabella, that we must turn away from the Mount for answers. We are too isolated up there. We understand less than nothing, I often think. The world is in peril: it’s time now for us to be reborn, to give the crown to someone truly from the outside world, someone not part of our little self-perpetuating aristocracy—someone with another perspective, who has seen the view from below—”

  “He’s so young, though!”

  “Time will take care of that,” said Valentine. “I know there are many who think I should already have become Pontifex, but I will go on disappointing them as long as I can. The boy must have his full training first. Nor will I pretend, as you know, any eagerness to hurry onward to the Labyrinth.”

  “No,” Carabella said. “And we talk as though the present Pontifex is already dead, or at death’s door. But Tyeveras still lives.”

  “He does, yes,” said Valentine. “At least in certain senses of the word. Let him continue to live some while longer, I pray.”

  “And when Hissune is ready—?”

  “Then I’ll let Tyeveras rest at last.”

  “I find it hard to imagine you as Pontifex, Valentine.”

  “I find it even harder, love. But I will do it, because I must. Only not soon: not soon, is what I ask!”

  After a pause Carabella said, “You will unsettle Castle Mount for certain, if you do this thing. Isn’t Elidath supposed to be the next Coronal?”

  “He is very dear to me.”

  “You’ve called him the heir presumptive yourself, many times.”

  “So I have,” Valentine said. “But Elidath has changed, since we first had our training together. You know, love, anyone who desperately wants to be Coronal is plainly unfit for the throne. But one must at least be willing. One must have a sense of calling, an inner fire of a sort. I think that fire has gone out, in Elidath.”

  “You thought it had gone out in yourself, when you were juggling and first were told you had a higher destiny.”

  “But it returned, Carabella, as my old self reentered my mind! And it remains. I often weary of my crown—but I think I’ve never regretted having it.”

  “And Elidath would?”

  “So I suspect. He’s playing at being Coronal now, while I’m away. My guess is that he doesn’t like it much. Besides, he’s past forty. The Coronal should be a young man.”

  “Forty is still young, Valentine,” said Carabella with a grin.

  He shrugged. “I hope it is, love. But I remind you that if I have my way, there’ll be no cause to name a new Coronal for a long time. And by then, I think, Hissune will be prepared and Elidath will step gracefully aside.”

  “Will the other lords of the Mount be as graceful, though?”

  “They will have to be,” said Valentine. He offered her his arm. “Come: Nascimonte is waiting for us.”

  BECAUSE IT WAS THE fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, which was the holy day that commemorated the exodus from the ancient capital beyond the sea, there was an important obeisance to perform before Faraataa could begin the task of making contact with his agents in the outlying provinces.

  It was the time of the year in Piurifayne when the rains came twice daily, once at the hour bef
ore dawn, once at twilight. It was necessary to make the Velalisier ritual in darkness but also in dryness, and so Faraataa had instructed himself to awaken at the hour of the night that is known as the Hour of the Jackal, when the sun still rests upon Alhanroel in the east.

  Without disturbing those who slept near him, he made his way out of the flimsy wicker cottage that they had constructed the day before—Faraataa and his followers kept constantly on the move; it was safest that way—and slipped into the forest. The air was moist and thick, as always, but there was no scent yet of the morning rains.

  He saw, by the glitter of starlight coming through rifts in the clouds, other figures moving also toward the jungle depths. But he did not acknowledge them, nor they him. The Velalisier obeisance was performed alone: a private ritual for a public grief. One never spoke of it; one simply did it, on the fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, and when one’s children were of age one instructed them in the manner of doing it, but always with shame, always with sorrow. That was the Way.

  He walked into the forest for the prescribed three hundred strides. That brought him to a grove of slender towering gibaroons; but he could not pray properly here, because aerial clumps of gleam-bells dangled from every crotch and pucker of their trunks, casting a sharp orange glow. Not far away he spied a majestic old dwikka tree, standing by itself, that bad been gouged by lightning some ages ago: a great cavernous charred scar, covered along its edges by regrown red bark, offered itself to him as a temple. The light of the gleam-bells would not penetrate there.

  Standing naked in the shelter of the dwikka’s huge scar, he performed first the Five Changes.

  His bones and muscles flowed, his skin cells modified themselves, and he became the Red Woman; and after her, the Blind Giant; and then the Flayed Man; and in the fourth of the Changes he took on the form of the Final King; and then, drawing breath deeply and calling upon all his power, he became the Prince To Come. For Faraataa, the Fifth Change was the deepest struggle: it required him to alter not only the outer lineaments of his body but the contours of the soul itself, from which he had to purge all hatred, all hunger for vengeance, all lust for destruction. The Prince To Come had transcended those things. Faraataa had no hope of achieving that. He knew that in his soul there dwelled nothing but hatred, hunger for vengeance, lust for destruction; to become the Prince To Come, he must empty himself to a husk, and that he could not do. But there were ways of approaching the desired state. He dreamed of a time when all that he had been working for was accomplished: the enemy destroyed, the forsaken lands reclaimed, the rites reestablished, the world born anew. He journeyed forth into that era and let its joy possess him. He forced from his soul all recollection of defeat, exile, loss. He saw the tabernacles of the dead city come alive. In the grip of such a vision, what need for vengeance? What enemy was there to hate and destroy? A strange and wondrous peace spread through his spirit. The day of rebirth had arrived; all was well in the world; his pain was gone forever, and he was at rest.

  In that moment he took on the form of the Prince To Come.

  Maintaining that form with a discipline that grew less effortful by the moment, he knelt and arranged the stones and feathers to make the altar. He captured two lizards and a night-crawling bruul and used them for the offering. He passed the Three Waters, spittle, urine, and tears. He gathered pebbles and laid them out in the shape of the Velalisier rampart. He uttered the Four Sorrows and the Five Griefs. He knelt and ate earth. A vision of the lost city entered his mind: the blue stone rampart, the dwelling of the king, the Place of Unchangingness, the Tables of the Gods, the six high temples, the seventh that was defiled, the Shrine of the Downfall, the Road of the Departure. Still maintaining, with an effort, the form of the Prince To Come, he told himself the tale of the downfall of Velalisier, experiencing that dark tragedy while feeling the grace and aura of the Prince upon him, so that he could comprehend the loss of the great capital not with pain but with actual love, seeing it as a necessary stage in the journey of his people, unavoidable, inevitable. When he knew he had come to accept the truth of that he allowed himself to shift form, reverting to the shapes of the Final King, the Flayed Man, the Blind Giant, the Red Woman, and then at last to that of Faraataa of Avendroyne.

  It was done.

  He lay sprawled facedown on the soft mossy soil as the first rains of morning began to fall.

  After a time he rose, gathered the stones and feathers of the little altar, and walked back toward the cottage. The peace of the Prince To Come still lay upon his soul, but he strived now to put that benign aura from him: the time had come to commence the work of the day. Such things as hatred, destruction, and vengeance might be alien to the spirit of the Prince To Come, but they were necessary tools in the task of bringing the kingdom of the Prince into being.

  He waited outside the cottage until enough of the others had returned from their own obeisances to allow him to enter upon the calling of the water-kings. One by one, they took up their positions about him, Aarisiim with his hand to Faraataa’s right shoulder, Benuuiab to the left, Siimii touching his forehead, Miisiim his loins, and the rest arranged in concentric circles about those four, linked arm to ann.

  “Now,” Faraataa said. And their minds joined and thrust outward.

  —Brother in the sea!

  The effort was so great that Faraataa felt his shape flowing and shifting of its own accord, like that of a child just learning how to bring the power into play. He sprouted feathers, talons, six terrible beaks; he became a bilantoon, a sigimoin, a snorting raging bidlak. Those about him gripped him all the more tightly, although the intensity of his signal held such force that some of them too fluttered as he did from form to form.

  —Brother! Hear me! Help me!

  And from the vastness of the depths came the image of huge dark wings slowly opening and closing over titanic bodies. And then a voice like a hundred bells tolling at once:

  —I hear, little land-brother.

  It was the water-king Maazmoorn who spoke. Faraataa knew them all by the music of their minds: Maazmoorn the bells, Girouz the singing thunder, Sheitoon the slow sad drums. There were dozens of the great kings, and the voice of each was unmistakable.

  —Carry me, O King Maazmoorn!

  —Come upon me, O land-brother.

  Faraataa felt the pull, and yielded himself to it, and was lifted upward and out, leaving his body behind. In an instant he was at the sea, an instant more and he entered it; and then he and Maazmoorn were one. Ecstasy overwhelmed him: that joining, that communion, was so potent that it could easily be an end in itself, a delight that fulfilled all yearnings, if he would allow it. But he never would allow it.

  The seat of the water-king’s towering intelligence was itself like an ocean—limitless, all-enfolding, infinitely deep. Faraataa, sinking down and down and down, lost himself in it. But never did he lose awareness of his task. Through the strength of the water-king he would achieve what he never could have done unaided. Gathering himself, he brought his powerful mind to its finest focus and from his place at the core of that warm cradling vastness he sent forth the messages he had come here to transmit:

  —Saarekkin?

  —I am here.

  —What is the report?

  —The lusavender is altogether destroyed throughout the eastern Rift. We have established the fungus beyond hope of eradication, and it is spreading on its own.

  —What action is the government taking?

  —The burning of infected crops. It will be futile.

  —Victory is ours, Saarekkin!

  —Victory is ours, Faraataa!

  —Tiihaanimak?

  —I hear you, Faraataa.

  —What news?

  —The poison traveled upon the rain, and the niyk-trees are destroyed in all Dulorn. It leaches now through the soil and will ruin the glein and the stajja. We are preparing the next attack. Victory is ours, Faraataa!

  —Victory is ours! Iniriis?

&
nbsp; —I am Iniriis. The root-weevils thrive and spread in the fields of Zimroel. They will devour the ricca and the milaile.

  —When will the effects be visible?

  —They are visible now. Victory is ours, Faraataa!

  —We have won Zimroel. The battle now must shift to Alhanroel, Iniriis. Begin shipping your weevils across the Inner Sea.

  —It will be done.

  —Victory is ours, Iniriis! Y-Uulisaan?

  —This is Y-Uulisaan, Faraataa.

  —You follow the Coronal still?

  —I do. He has left Ebersinul and makes for Treymone.

  —Does he know what is happening in Zimroel?

  —He knows nothing. The grand processional absorbs his energies completely.

  —Bring him the report, then. Tell him of weevils in the valley of the Zimr, of the lusavender blight in the Rift, of the death of niyk and glein and stajja west of Dulorn.

  —I, Faraataa?

  —We must get even closer to him. The news must reach him sooner or later through legitimate channels. Let it come from us first and let that be our way of approach to him. You will be his adviser on the diseases of plants, Y-Uulisaan. Tell him the news; and aid him in the struggle against these blights. We should know what counterattacks are planned. Victory is ours, Y-Uulisaan.

  —Victory is ours, Faraataa!

  THE MESSAGE WAS MORE than an hour old when it finally reached the high spokesman Hornkast in his private lair far uplevel, just outside the Sphere of Triple Shadows:

  Meet me in the throne room right away.

  —Sepulthrove

  The high spokesman glared at the messengers. They knew he was never to be disturbed in this chamber except for a matter of the greatest urgency.

  “What is it? Is he dying? Dead already?”

  “We were not told, sir.”

  “Did Sepulthrove seem unusually disturbed?”

  “He seemed uneasy, sir, but I have no idea—”

  “All right. Never mind. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Hastily Hornkast cleansed himself and dressed. If it has truly come, he thought sourly, it comes at a most inconvenient moment. Tyeveras has waited at least a dozen decades for his dying; could he not have held off another hour or two? If it has truly come.