Valentine Pontifex Read online

  THOUGH SHE HAD merely intended to rest her eyes a moment or two before she began preparing dinner, a deep and powerful sleep came quickly over Elsinome when she lay down, drawing her into a cloudy realm of yellow shadows and rubbery pink hills; and though she had scarcely expected a sending to come to her during a casual before-dinner nap, she felt a gentle pressure at the gateways of her soul as she descended into the fullness of her slumber, and knew it to be the presence of the Lady coming upon her.

  Elsinome was tired all the time, lately. She had never worked so hard as in the last few days, since news of the crisis in western Zimroel had reached the Labyrinth. Now the café was full all day long with tense officials of the Pontificate, exchanging the latest information over a few bowls of fine Muldemar or good golden Dulornese wine—they wanted only the best, when they were this worried. And so she was constantly running back and forth, juggling her, inventories calling in extra supplies from the wine merchants. It had been exciting, in a way, at first: she felt almost as though she were participating herself in this critical moment of history. But now it was merely exhausting.

  Her last thought before falling asleep was of Hissune: Prince Hissune, as she was still trying to learn to regard him. She had not heard from him in months, not since that astonishing letter, so dreamlike itself, telling her that they had called him to the highest circle of the Castle. He had begun to seem unreal to her after that, no longer the small sharp-eyed clever boy who once had amused and comforted and supported her, but a stranger in fine robes who spent his days among the councils of the great, holding unimaginable discourse on the ultimate destinies of the world. An image came to her of Hissune at a vast table polished to mirror brightness, sitting among older men whose features were unclearly limned but from whom there radiated great presence and authority, and they were all looking toward Hissune as he spoke. Then the scene vanished and she saw yellow clouds and pink hills, and the Lady entered her mind.

  It was the briefest of sendings. She was on the Isle—that much she knew from the white cliffs and the steeply rising terraces, though she had never actually been there, never in fact been outside the Labyrinth—and in a dreamlike drifting way she was moving through a garden that was at first immaculate and airy and then imperceptibly became dark and overgrown. The Lady was by her side, a black-haired woman in white robes who seemed sad and weary, not at all the strong, warm, comforting person Elsinome had met in earlier sendings: she was bowed with care, her eyes were hooded and downcast, her movements uncertain. “Give me your strength,” the Lady murmured. This is all wrong, thought Elsinome. The Lady comes to us to offer strength, not to receive it. But the dream-Elsinome did not hesitate. She was vigorous and tall, with a nimbus of light flickering about her head and shoulders. She drew the Lady to her, and took her against her breast and held her in a close strong embrace, and the Lady sighed and it seemed that some of the pain went from her. Then the two women drew apart and the Lady, glowing now as Elsinome was, touched her fingers to her lips and threw a kiss to Elsinome, and vanished.

  That was all. With startling suddenness Elsinome woke and saw the familiar dreary walls of her flat in Guadeloom Court. The afterglow of a sending was on her beyond any doubt, but the sendings of other years had left her always with a strong sense of new purpose, of directions redirected, and this one had brought only mystification. She could not understand the purpose of such a sending; but perhaps it would manifest itself to her, she thought, in a day or two.

  She heard sounds in her daughters’ room.

  “Ailimoor? Maraune?”

  Neither girl answered. Elsinome peered in and saw them huddling close over some small object, which Maraune put quickly behind her back.

  “What’s that you have there?”

  “It’s nothing, mother. Just a little thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “A trinket. Sort of.”

  Something in Maraune’s tone made Elsinome suspicous. “Let me see it.”

  “It really isn’t anything.”

  “Let me see.” Maraune shot a quick look toward her older sister. Ailimoor, looking uneasy and awkward, simply shrugged.

  “It’s personal, mother. Doesn’t a girl get to have any privacy?” Maraune said.

  Elsinome held out her hand. Sighing, Maraune brought forth and reluctantly surrendered a small sea-dragon tooth, finely carved over much of its surface with unfamiliar and peculiarly disturbing symbols of an odd, narrow-angled sort. Elsinome, still in part enveloped in the strange aura of the sending, found the little amulet sinister and menacing.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Everyone’s got them, mother.”

  “I asked you where it came from.”

  “Vanimoon. Actually Vanimoon’s sister Shulaire. But she got it from him. Can I please have it back?”

  “Do you know what this thing means?” Elsinome asked.

  “Means?”

  “That’s what I said. What it means.”

  Shrugging, Maraune said, “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a trinket. I’m going to drill a hole in it and wear it on a string.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  Maraune was silent. Ailimoor said, “Mother, I—” She faltered.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s just a fad, mother. Everyone’s got them. There’s some crazy new Liiman idea going around that the sea dragons are gods, that they’re going to take over the world, that all the trouble that’s been happening lately is a sign of what’s to come. And people say that if we carry the sea-dragon teeth, we’ll be saved when the dragons come ashore.”

  Coldly Elsinome said, “There’s nothing new about it. Nonsense like that has been going around for hundreds of years. But always hidden, always in whispers, because it’s crazy and dangerous and sick. Sea dragons are oversized fish and nothing more. The One who looks over us is the Divine, protecting us through the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady. Do you understand? Do you understand?”

  She snapped the tapering tooth in half with a quick angry motion and tossed the pieces to Maraune, who glared at her with a fury that Elsinome had never seen in the eyes of one of her daughters before. Hastily she turned away, toward the kitchen. Her hands were shaking, and she felt chilled; and if the peace of the Lady had descended upon her at all in the sending—that sending which now seemed to have come to her weeks ago—it was entirely gone from her now.

  THE ENTRY TO NUMINOR HARBOR took all the skill the most skillful pilot could muster, for the channel was narrow and the currents were swift, and sandy reefs sometimes were born overnight in the volatile underbeds. But Pandelume was a calm and confident figure on the wheel deck, giving her signals with clear decisive gestures, and the royal flagship came in jauntily, past the neck of the channel and into the broad sweet safe anchorage, the only possible one on the Alhanroel side of the Isle of Sleep, the one place where a breach existed in the tremendous chalk wall of First Cliff.

  “I can feel my mother’s presence from here,” said Valentine as they made ready to go ashore. “She comes to me like the fragrance of alabandina blossoms on the wind.”

  “Will the Lady be here to greet us today?” Carabella asked.

  “I much doubt it,” Valentine said. “Custom calls for son to go to mother, not mother to son. She’ll remain at Inner Temple, and send her hierarchs, I suppose, to fetch us.”

  A group of hierarchs indeed was waiting when the royal party disembarked. Among these women, in golden robes trimmed with red, was one already well known to Valentine, the austere white-haired Lorivade, who had accompanied him during the war of restoration on his journey from the Isle to Castle Mount, training him in the techniques of trance and mental projection that were practiced on the Isle. A second figure in the group seemed familiar to Valentine but he could not place her until the very instant when she spoke her name: and simultaneous with that came the flash of recognition, that this was Talinot Esulde, the slender, enigmatic person wh
o had been his first guide on his pilgrimage to the Isle long ago. Then she had had a shaven skull, and Valentine had been unable to guess her sex, suspecting her to be male from her height or female from the delicacy of her features and the lightness of her frame; but since her advancement to the inner hierarchy she had allowed her hair to grow, and those long silken locks, as golden as Valentine’s own but far finer of texture, left no doubt that she was a woman.

  “We carry dispatches for you, my lord,” said the hierarch Lorivade. “There is much news, and none of it good, I fear. But first we should conduct you to the royal lodging-place.”

  There was a house in Numinor port known as the Seven Walls, which was a name that no one understood, because it was so ancient that its origins had been forgotten. It stood on the rampart of the city overlooking the sea, with its face toward Alhanroel and its back to the steep triple tiers of the Isle, and it was built of massive blocks of dark granite hewn from the quarries of the Stoienzar Peninsula, fitted together in a perfect joining with no trace of mortar. Its sole function was to serve as a place of refreshment for a visiting Coronal newly arrived on the Isle, and so it went unused for years at a time; yet it was scrupulously maintained by a large staff, as though a Coronal might arrive without warning at any moment and must needs have his house in order at the hour of his landing.

  It was very old, as old as the Castle itself, and older, so far as archaeologists could determine, then any of the temples and holy terraces now in existence elsewhere on the Isle. According to legend it had been built for the reception of Lord Stiamot by his mother, the fabled Lady Thiin, upon his visit to the Isle of Sleep at the conclusion of the Metamorph wars of eight thousand years ago. Some said that the name Seven Walls was a reference to the entombing in the foundations of the building, as it was being constructed, of the bodies of seven Shapeshifter warriors slain by Lady Thiin’s own hand during the defense of the Isle against Metamorph invasion. But no such remains had ever come to light in the periodic reconstructions of the old building; and also it was thought unlikely by most modern historians that Lady Thin, heroic woman that she was, had actually wielded weapons herself in the Battle of the Isle. By another tradition, a seven-sided chapel erected by Lord Stiamot in honor of his mother once had stood in the central courtyard, giving its name to the entire structure. That chapel, so the story went, had been dismantled on the day of Lord Stiamot’s death and shipped to Alaisor to become the pediment of his tomb. But that too was unproven, for no trace of an early seven-sided structure could be detected in the courtyard now, and there was little likelihood that anyone today would excavate Lord Stiamot’s tomb to see what could be learned from its pavingblocks. Valentine himself preferred a different version of the origin of the name, which held that Seven Walls was merely a corruption into the Majipoori tongue of certain ancient Metamorph words that meant “The place where the fish scales are scraped off,” and referred to the prehistoric use of the shore of the Isle by Shapeshifter fishermen sailing from Alhanroel. But it was unlikely that the truth would ever be determined.

  There were rituals of arrival that a Coronal was supposed to perform upon reaching the Seven Walls, by way of aiding his transition from the world of action that was his usual sphere to the world of the spirit in which the Lady was supreme. While Valentine carried these things out—a matter of ceremonial bathing, of the burning of aromatic herbs, of meditation in a private chamber whose walls were airy damasks of pierced marble—he left Carabella to read through the dispatches that had accumulated for him during the weeks he was at sea; and when he returned, cleansed and calm, he saw at once from the stark expression of her eyes that he had gone about his rituals too soon, that he would be drawn back instantly into the realm of events.

  “How bad is the news?” he asked.

  “It could scarcely be worse, my lord.”

  She handed him the sheaf of documents, which she had winnowed so that the uppermost sheets gave him the gist of the most important documents. Failure of crops in seven provinces—severe shortage of food in many parts of Zimroel—the beginnings of a mass migration out of the heartland of the continent toward the western coastal cities—sudden prominence of a formerly obscure religious cult, apocalyptic and millennial in nature, centering around the belief that sea dragons were supernatural beings that would soon come ashore to announce the birth of a new epoch—

  He looked up, aghast.

  “All this in so short a time?”

  “And these are only fragmentary reports, Valentine. No one really knows what’s going on out there right now—the distances are so vast, the communications channels so disturbed—” His hand sought hers. “Everything foretold in my dreams and visions is coming to pass. The darkness is coming, Carabella, and I am all that stands in its path.”

  “There are some who stand beside you, love.”

  “That I know. And for that am I grateful. But at the last moment I will be alone, and then what will I do?” He smiled ruefully. “There was a time when we were juggling at the Perpetual Circus in Dulorn, do you recall, and the knowledge of my true identity was only then beginning to break through to my awareness. And I was speaking with Deliamber, and telling him that perhaps it was the will of the Divine that I had been overthrown, and that perhaps it was just as well for Majipoor that the usurper keep my name and my throne, for I had no real desire to be king and the other might indeed prove to be a capable ruler. Which Deliamber denied completely, and said there could be only one lawfully consecrated king and I was that one, and must return to my place. You ask a great deal of me, I said. ‘History asks a great deal,’ he replied. ‘History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason.’ And also: ‘It matters, my lord, it matters very much,’ said he, ‘who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal.’ I have never forgotten those words of his, and I never will.”

  “And how did you answer him?”

  “I answered ‘yes’ and then I added ‘perhaps,’ and he said, ‘You’ll go on wavering from yes to perhaps a long while, but yes will govern in the end.’ And so it did, and therefore I recaptured my throne—and nevertheless we move further every day from order and creation and reason, and closer to anarchy, destruction, unreason.” Valentine stared at her in anguish. “Was Deliamber wrong, then? Does it matter who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal? I think I am a good man, and sometimes I think even that I am a wise ruler; and yet even so the world falls apart, Carabella, despite my best efforts or because of them, I know not which. It might have been better for everyone if I had stayed a wandering juggler.”

  “Oh, Valentine, what foolish talk this is!”

  “Is it?”

  “Are you saying that if you’d left Dominin Barjazid to rule, there would have been a fine lusavender harvest this year? How are you to blame for crop failures in Zimroel? These are natural calamities, with natural causes, and you’ll find a wise way to deal with them, because wisdom is your way, and you are the chosen of the Divine.”

  “I am chosen of the princes of Castle Mount,” he said. “They are human and fallible.”

  “The Divine speaks through them when a Coronal is chosen. And the Divine did not mean you to be the instrument of Majipoor’s destruction. These reports are serious but not terrifying. You will speak with your mother in a few days, and she’ll fortify you where weariness makes you weaken; and then we’ll proceed on to Zimroel and you will set all to rights.”

  “So I hope, Carabella. But—”

  “So you know, Valentine! I say once more, my lord, I hardly recognize in you the man I know, when you speak this gloomy way.” She tapped the sheaf of dispatches. “I would not minimize these things. But I think there is much we can do to turn back the darkness, and that it will be done.” He nodded slowly. “So I think myself, much of the time. But at other times—”

  “At other times it’s best no
t to think at all.” A knock sounded at the door. “Good,” she said. “We are interrupted, and I give thanks for that, for I tire of hearing you make all these downcast noises, my love.”

  She admitted Talinot Esulde to the room. The hierarch said, “My lord, your mother the Lady has arrived, and wishes to see you in the Emerald Room.”

  “My mother here? But I expected to go to her tomorrow, at Inner Temple!”

  “She has come to you,” said Talinot Esulde imperturbably.

  The Emerald Room was a study in green: walls of green serpentine, floors of green onyx, translucent panes of green jade in place of windows. The Lady stood in the center of the room, between the two huge potted tanigales, covered with dazzling blossoms of metallic green, that were virtually all that the chamber contained. Valentine went quickly toward her. She stretched her hands to him, and as their fingertips met he felt the familiar throbbing of the current that radiated from her, the sacred force that, like spring water draining into a well, had accumulated in her through all her years of intimate contact with the billions of souls of Majipoor.

  He had spoken with her in dreams many times, but he had not seen her in years, and he was unprepared for the changes time had worked upon her. She was still beautiful: the passing of the years could not affect that. But age now had cast the faintest of veils over her, and the sheen was gone from her black hair, the warmth of her gaze was ever so slightly diminished, her skin seemed somehow to have loosened its grasp on her flesh. Yet she carried herself as splendidly as ever, and she was, as always, magnificently robed in white, with a flower behind one ear, and the silver circlet of her power on her brow: a figure of grace and majesty, of force and of infinite compassion.