Lord Valentine's Castle m-1 Read online

  "Do I give that?"

  "We have talked of little else, since you came among us. That you must be a fallen prince, some exiled duke perhaps. But then my dream — it leaves no doubt, lord—"

  Her face was white with strain. For a moment she had overcome her awe, but only for a moment, and now she trembled again. And the awe was contagious, it seemed, for Valentine himself began to feel fear, a coldness of the skin. Was there truth in any of this? Was he an anointed Coronal that had touched hands with Tyeveras in the heart of the Labyrinth and at the summit of Castle Mount?

  He heard the voice of the dream-speaker Tisana. You have fallen from a high place, and now you must begin to climb back to it, she had said. Impossible. Unthinkable. Nevertheless, Lord Valentine, that ascent awaits you, and it is not I who lays it on you. Unreal. Impossible. And yet his dreams, that brother who would have slain him, and whom he had slain instead, and those Coronals and Pontifexes moving through the chambers of his soul, and all the rest. Could it be? Impossible. Impossible.

  He said, "You mustn’t fear me, Carabella."

  She shivered. He reached for her and she shied away, crying, "No! Don’t touch me! My lord—"

  Tenderly he said, "Even if I was once Coronal — and how strange and foolish that sounds to me — even if, Carabella, I am Coronal no longer, I am not in any anointed body, and what has taken place between us is no sacrilege. I am Valentine the juggler now, whoever I may have been in a former life."

  "You don’t understand, lord."

  "I understand that a Coronal is a man like any other, only he bears more responsibilities than others, but there is nothing magical about him and nothing to fear except his power, and I have none of that. If ever I had."

  "No," she said. "A Coronal is touched by the highest grace, and it never goes from him."

  "Anyone can be Coronal, given the right training and the right cast of mind. One isn’t bred for it. Coronals have come from every district of Majipoor, every level of society."

  "Lord, you don’t understand. To have been Coronal is to be touched by grace. You have ruled, you have walked on Castle Mount, you have been adopted into the line of Lord Stiamot and Lord Dekkeret and Lord Prestimion, you are brother to Lord Voriax, you are the son of the Lady of the Isle. And I am to think of you as an ordinary man? I am to have no fear of you?"

  He stared at her in shock.

  He remembered what had gone through his own mind when he stood in the streets and beheld Lord Valentine the Coronal in the procession, and had felt himself in the presence of grace and might, and had realized that to be Coronal was to become a being set apart, a personage of aura and strangeness, one who holds power over twenty billions, who carries in himself the energies of thousands of years of famed princes, who is destined to go on to the Labyrinth one day and wear the authority of the Pontifex. Incomprehensible as all this was to him, it was sinking in, and he was dumbfounded and overwhelmed by it. But it was absurd. To fear himself? To sink down in awe at his own imaginary majesty? He was Valentine the juggler, and nothing more!

  Carabella was sobbing. In another moment she would be hysterical. The Vroon, surely, would have some sleeping potion that would give her ease.

  "Wait," Valentine said. "I’ll be back in a moment. I’ll ask Deliamber for something to calm you."

  He darted from the room, down the hall, wondering which room was the sorcerer’s. All doors were closed. He debated knocking at random, hoping not to blunder in on Zalzan Kavol, when a dry voice said out of the darkness from a point somewhere below his elbow, "Do you have trouble sleeping?"

  "Deliamber?"

  "Here. Close by you."

  Valentine peered, narrowing his eyes, and made out the Vroon sitting cross-tentacled in the hallway in some kind of posture of meditation. Deliamber rose.

  "I thought you might come in search of me soon," he said.

  "Carabella has had a sending. She needs a drug to quiet her spirit. Do you have anything useful?"

  "No drugs, no. A touch, though — it can be done. Come." The little Vroon glided along the corridor and into the room that Valentine shared with Carabella. She had not moved, still huddled pitifully beside the bed with her robe wrapped carelessly about her. Deliamber went to her at once; his ropy tendrils delicately enfolded her shoulders, and she loosened her tautly held muscles, and slumped as though rendered boneless. The sound of her heavy breathing was loud in the room. After a moment she looked up, calmer now, but still with a dazed, frozen look in her eyes.

  She gestured toward Valentine and said, "I dreamed that he was— that he had been—" She hesitated.

  "I know," said Deliamber.

  "It is not true," Valentine said thickly. "I am only a juggler."

  Mildly Deliamber said, "You are only a juggler now."

  "You believe this nonsense too?"

  "It was obvious from the first. When you stepped between the Skandar and me. This is the act of a king, I told myself, and I read your soul—"

  "What?"

  "A professional trick. I read your soul, and saw what had been done to you—"

  "But such a thing is impossible!" Valentine protested. "To take a man’s mind from his body, and put it in another’s, and put another’s mind in his—"

  "Impossible? No," Deliamber said. "I think not. There have been tales coming out of Suvrael that studies into this art are being done at the court of the King of Dreams. For several years now the rumors of strange experiments have trickled forth."

  Valentine stared sullenly at his fingertips. "It could not be done."

  "So I thought too, when first I heard it. But then I considered. There are many wizardries nearly as great whose secrets I myself know, and I am only a minor wizard. The seeds of such an art have long existed. Maybe some Suvraelu sorcerer has found a way to germinate those seeds at last. Valentine, if I were you I would not reject the possibility."

  "A change of bodies?" Valentine said, bewildered. "This is not my true body? Whose would it be, then?"

  "Who knows? Some unlucky man struck down by accident, drowned perhaps, or choked on a piece of meat, or the victim of some evil toadstool unwisely eaten. Dead, anyway, in some manner that left his body reasonably whole; and taken within the hour of death to some secret place, there to have the Coronal’s soul transplanted into the empty shell, and then another man, giving up his own body forever, quickly taking possession of the Coronal’s vacated skull, possibly retaining much of the Coronal’s own memory and mind in union with his own, so that he can carry on the masquerade of ruling as though he were the true monarch—"

  "I accept none of this as remotely real," said Valentine stubbornly.

  "Nevertheless," Deliamber said, "when I looked into your soul I saw everything even as I describe it to you now. And felt more than a little fear — in my trade one doesn’t often meet Coronals, or stumble on such evidence of gross treason — and I took a moment to compose myself, and asked myself if I would not be wiser to forget what I had seen, and for a time I seriously considered it. But then I knew that I could not, that I would be whipped with monstrous dreams until the end of my days if I ignored what I knew. I told myself that there is much in the world that is in need of repair, and I would, Divine willing, be part of the fixing. And now the fixing has begun."

  Valentine said, "There is nothing to it."

  "For the sake of argument, say that there is," Deliamber urged. "Pretend that they came upon you in Til-omon and cast you from your body and put a usurper upon the throne. Suppose that is the case. What would you do then?"

  "Nothing at all."

  "No?"

  "Nothing," said Valentine forcefully. "Let him be Coronal who wants to be Coronal. I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen. If I once dwelled on Castle Mount, so be it, but I am not there now, and nothing in my being impels me to go back there. I’m a juggler and a good one getting better, and a happy man. Is the Coronal happy? Is the Pontifex? If I have been cast out of power, I regard it a
s good fortune. I would not now resume the burden."

  "It is what you were destined to carry."

  "Destined? Destined?" Valentine laughed. "Just as fair to say that I was destined to be Coronal a little while, and then to be displaced by someone more fitting. One must be crazy to be a ruler, Deliamber, and I’m sane. The government is a burden and a chore. I would not accept it."

  "You will," Deliamber said. "You’ve been tampered with and you are not yourself. But once a Coronal, forever a Coronal. You will be healed and come into your own again, Lord Valentine."

  "Don’t use that title!"

  "It will be yours again," said Deliamber.

  Valentine angrily shook the suggestion away. He looked toward Carabella: she was asleep on the floor, head against the bed. Carefully he lifted her and put her under the coverlet. To Deliamber he said. "It grows late, and there’s been much foolishness tonight. My head hurts from all this heavy talk. Do to me what you did to her, wizard, and grant me sleep, and say no more to me of responsibilities that have never been mine and are never going to be mine. We must perform tomorrow, and I want to be rested for it."

  "Very well. Get into bed."

  Valentine settled in beside Carabella. The Vroon touched him lightly, then with more force, and Valentine felt his mind growing cloudy. Sleep came upon him easily, like a thick white mist sweeping up out of the ocean at twilight. Good. Good. Willingly he relinquished consciousness.

  And in the night he dreamed, and there was about the dream a bright fierce glow that had the unmistakable aspect of a sending, for it was a dream vivid beyond imagining.

  He saw himself crossing the harsh and terrible purple plain that he had visited so often in recent slumber. This time he knew without question where the plain was: no realm of fantasy, but the distant continent of Suvrael, that lay beneath the unshielded glare of the naked sun, and these fissures in the ground were scars of summer, where what little moisture the soil contained had been sucked forth. Ugly twisted plants with swollen grayish leaves lay limp against the ground, and things with thorns and weird angular joints grew tall. Valentine walked swiftly, in the heat and the merciless biting wind and the skin-cracking dryness. He was late, overdue at the palace of the King of Dreams, where he had been hired to perform.

  The palace now loomed before him, sinister, black-shadowed, all spidery turrets and jagged porticoes, a building as spiky and forbidding as the plants of the desert. More a jail than a palace it seemed, at least in its outer aspect, but inside everything was different, cool and luxurious, with fountains in the courtyards, and soft plush draperies, and a scent of flowers in the air. Servants bowed and beckoned to him, leading him to inner chambers, stripping away his sand-crusted clothes, bathing him, drying him in feathery towels, giving him fresh clothes, elegant jeweled robes, offering him chilled sherbets, icy wine of a silvery hue, morsels of unknown delicate meats, and at last bringing him to the great high-vaulted throne-room where the King of Dreams sat in state.

  At a vast distance Valentine saw him enthroned: Simonan Barjazid, the malign and unpredictable Power who from this wind-swept desert territory sent his messages of terrible import all through Majipoor. He was a heavy-bodied man, his face beardless, fleshy-jowled, eyes deep-set and ringed with dark circles, and around his close-cropped stubby head he wore the golden diadem of his power, the thought-amplifying apparatus that a Barjazid had devised a thousand years ago. To Simonan’s left sat his son Cristoph, fleshy like his father, and at his right hand was his son Minax, the heir, a man of lean and forbidding aspect, dark-skinned and sharp-faced, as if honed by the desert winds.

  The King of Dreams, with a casual wave of his hand, ordered Valentine to begin.

  It was knives he juggled, ten, fifteen of them, thin shining stilettos that would pierce right through his arm if they dropped wrongly, but he handled them with ease, juggling as only Sleet might do, or perhaps Zalzan Kavol, a virtuoso display of skill. Valentine stood still, making only the tiniest flicking motions of his hands and wrists, and the knives soared aloft and flashed with keen brilliance, coursing high through the air and falling perfectly back to his waiting fingers, and as they rose and fell, rose and fell, the arc that they described took on an alteration of form, no longer a mere cascade but becoming the starburst emblem of the Coronal, blades pointing outward as they flew through the air, and abruptly, as Valentine approached the climax of his performance, the knives froze in mid-air, and hovered there just above his questing fingers, and would not descend to them.

  And from behind the throne came a scowling fierce-eyed man who was Dominin Barjazid, the third of the sons of the King of Dreams, and he strode toward Valentine and with an easy contemptuous gesture swept the starburst of knives from the air, thrusting them into the sash of his robe.

  The King of Dreams smiled mockingly. "You are an excellent juggler, Lord Valentine. At last you find a proper occupation."

  "I am Coronal of Majipoor," Valentine replied.

  "Were. Were. Were. You are a wanderer now, and fit to be nothing more."

  "Lazy," said Minax Barjazid.

  "Cowardly," said Cristoph Barjazid. "Idle."

  "A shirker of duty," Dominin Barjazid declared.

  "Your rank is forfeit," said the King of Dreams. "Your office is vacated. Go. Go and juggle, Valentine the juggler. Go, idler. Go, wanderer."

  "I am Coronal of Majipoor," Valentine repeated firmly.

  "No longer," said the King of Dreams. He touched his hands to the diadem at his forehead and Valentine rocked and shook as if the ground had opened at his feet, and he stumbled and fell, and when he looked up again he saw that Dominin Barjazid now was clad in the green doublet and ermine robe of a Coronal, and altered in appearance so that his face was the face of Lord Valentine and his body was the body of Lord Valentine, and out of the juggling knives that he had taken from Valentine he had fashioned the starburst crown of a Coronal, which his father Simonan Barjazid now placed upon his brow.

  "See?" the King of Dreams cried. "Power passes to the worthy! Go, juggler! Go!"

  And Valentine fled into the purple desert, and saw the angry swirls of a sandstorm racing toward him out of the south, and tried to escape, but the storm came at him from all directions. He roared, "I am Lord Valentine the Coronal!" but his voice was lost in the wind and he felt sand in his teeth. He was blown away. He looked toward the palace of the King of Dreams, but it was no longer to be seen, and a great and shattering sense of eternal loss overwhelmed him.

  He woke.

  Carabella lay peacefully beside him. The first pale light of dawn was entering the room. Although it had been a monstrous dream, a sending of the most portentous sort, he felt utterly calm. For days now he had tried to deny the truth, but there was no rejecting it now, however bizarre, however fantastic it seemed. In another body he had once been Coronal of Majipoor, and body and identity had been stolen somehow from him. Could it be? A dream of such urgency could scarcely be dismissed or ignored. He sorted through the deepest places of his mind, trying to uncover memories of power, ceremonies on the Mount, glimpses of royal pomp, the taste of responsibility. Nothing. Nothing whatever. He was a juggler, and nothing more than a juggler, and he could remember no shred of his life before Pidruid: it was as if he had been born on that hillside, moments before Shanamir the herdsman had encountered him, born there with money in his purse and a flask of good red wine at his hip and a scattering of false memories in his mind.

  And if it was true? If he was Coronal?

  Why, then, he must go forth, for the sake of the commonwealth of Majipoor, to overthrow the tyrant and reclaim his rightful position. There would be that obligation upon him. But the notion was absurd. It created a dryness in his throat and a pounding in his chest, close to panic. To overthrow that dark-haired man of power, who had ridden in pomp through Pidruid? How could that possibly be done? How even come near to a Coronal, let alone push him from his perch? That it had been done once — maybe — was no argument that it could be
done again, and by a wandering juggler, an easy-natured young man who felt no compelling urge to tackle the impossible. Besides, Valentine saw in himself so little aptitude for governing. If he had in fact been Coronal, he must have had years of training on Castle Mount, a lengthy apprenticeship in the ways and uses of power; but not a trace of that was left to him now. How could he pretend to be a monarch, with none of a monarch’s skills in his head?

  And yet— and yet—

  He glanced down at Carabella. She was awake; her eyes were open; she was watching him in silence. The awe was still upon her, but no longer the terror.

  She said, "What will you do, lord?"

  "Call me Valentine, now and ever."

  "If you so command me."

  "I do so command you," he said.

  "And tell me — Valentine: what will you do?"

  "Travel with the Skandars," he replied. "Continue to juggle. Master the art more thoroughly. Keep close watch on my dreams. Bide my time, seek to comprehend. What else can I do, Carabella?" He put his hand lightly to hers, and momentarily she shrank from his touch, and then did not, but pressed her other hand above his. He smiled. "What else can I do, Carabella?"

  II

  The Book of the Metamorphs

  —1—

  THE GHAYROG CITY OF DULORN was an architectural marvel, a city of frosty brilliance that extended for two hundred miles up and down the heart of the great Dulorn Rift. Though it covered so huge an area, the city’s predominant thrust was vertical: great shining towers, fanciful of design but severely restrained in material, that rose like tapered fangs from the soft gypsum-rich ground. The only approved building material in Dulorn was the native stone of the region, a light, airy calcite of high refractive index, that glittered like fine crystal, or perhaps like diamond. Out of this the Dulornese had fashioned their sharp-tipped high-rise structures and embellished them with parapets and balconies, with enormous flamboyant flying buttresses, with soaring cantilevered ribs, with stalactites and stalagmites of sparkling facets, with lacy bridges far above the streets, with colonnades and domes and pendentives and pagodas. The juggling troupe of Zalzan Kavol, approaching the city from the west, came upon it almost exactly at noon, when the sun stood straight overhead and streaks of white flame seemed to dance along the flanks of the titanic towers. Valentine caught his breath in wonder. Such a vast place! Such a wondrous show of light and form!