Lord Valentine's Castle Read online

  “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 complaining. 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?”

  “The same. Yes. I’ve heard they’re called that in the east. You have a strange accent, do you know that?”

  “No stranger than yours, friend.”

  Shanamir laughed. “To me your accent’s strange. And I have no accent at all. I speak normal speech. You shape your words with fancy sounds. ‘We call them Metamorphs,’” he said, mimicking. “That’s how you sound to me. Is that Ni-moyan talk?”

  Valentine replied only with a shrug.

  Shanamir said, “They frighten me, Shapeshifters. Metamorphs. This would be a happier planet without them. Sneaking around, imitating others, working mischief. I wish they would keep to their own territory.”

  “Mostly they do—is that not so?”

  “Mostly. But they say a few live in each city. Plotting who knows what kind of trouble for the rest of us.” Shanamir leaned across toward Valentine, caught his arm, peered solemnly into his face. “One might meet one anywhere. Sitting on a ridge looking out toward Pidruid on a hot afternoon, for example.”

  “So you think I’m a Metamorph in masquerade?”

  The boy cackled. “Prove that you aren’t!”

  Valentine groped for some way to demonstrate his authenticity, found none, and made a terrifying face instead, stretching his cheeks as though they were rubber, twisting his lips in opposite directions, rolling his eyeballs high. “My true visage,” he said. “You have discovered me.” And they laughed, and passed on through Falkynkip Gate into the city of Pidruid.

  Within the gate everything seemed much older, the houses built in a curious angular style, humpbacked walls swelling outward and upward to tiled roofs, and the tiles themselves often chipped and broken, and interspersed with heavy clumps of low fleshy-leaved roof-weeds that had gained footholds in cracks and earthy pockets. A heavy layer of fog hovered over the city, and it was dark and cool beneath it, with lights glowing in almost every window. The main highway split, and split again, until now Shanamir was leading his animals down a much narrower street, though still a fairly straight one, with secondary streets coiling off from it in every direction. The streets were thick with folk. Such crowds made Valentine obscurely uncomfortable; he could not recall having had so many others so close about him at once, almost at his elbow, smack up against his mount, pushing, darting about, a jostling mob of porters, merchants, mariners, vendors, people from the hill country like Shanamir bringing animals or produce to the market, tourists in fine robes of glowing brocades, and little boys and girls underfoot everywhere. Festival time in Pidruid! Gaudy banners of scarlet cloth were strung across the street from the upper stories of buildings, two and three on every block, emblazoned with the starburst crest, hailing in bright green lettering Lord Valentine the Coronal, bidding him welcome to this, his westernmost metropolis.

  “Is it far to your inn?” Valentine asked.

  “Halfway across town. Are you hungry?”

  “A little. More than a little.”

  Shanamir signaled to his beasts and they marched obediently into a cobbled cul-de-sac between two arcades, where he left them. Then, dismounting, he pointed out a tiny grimy booth across the street. Skewered sausages hung grilling over a charcoal flame. The counterman was a Liiman, squat and hammer-headed, with pocked gray-black skin and three eyes that glowed like coals in a crater. The boy pantomimed, and the Liiman passed two skewers of sausages to them, and poured tumblers of pale amber beer. Valentine produced a coin and laid it on the counter. It was a fine thick coin, bright and gleaming, with a milled edge, and the Liiman looked at it as though Valentine had offered him a scorpion. Hastily Shanamir scooped up the piece and put down one of his own, a squarish coppery coin with a triangular hole punched in the center. The other he returned to Valentine. They retreated to the cul-de-sac with their dinner.

  “What did I do wrong?” Valentine asked.

  “With that coin you could buy the Liiman and all his sausages, and a month of beer! Where did you get it?”

  “Why, from my purse.”

  “Are there more like that in there?”

  “It could be,” said Valentine. He studied the coin, which bore on one face the image of an old man, gaunt and withered, and on the other the visage of a young and vigorous one. The denomination was fifty royals. “Will this be too valuable to use anywhere?” he asked. “What will it buy, in truth?”

  “Five of my mounts,” Shanamir said. “A year’s lodgings in princely style. Transportation to Alhanroel and back. Any of those. Perhaps even more. To most of us it would be many months’ wages. You have no idea of the value of things?”

 
Valentine looked abashed. “It would seem that way.”

  “These sausages cost ten weights. A hundred weights make a crown, ten crowns make a royal, and this is fifty of those. Now do you follow? I’ll change it for you at the market. Meanwhile keep it to yourself. This is an honest city and a safe one, more or less, but with a purse full of those you tempt fate. Why didn’t you tell me you were carrying a fortune?” Shanamir gestured broadly. “Because you didn’t know, I suppose. There’s such a strange innocence about you, Valentine. You make me feel like a man, and I’m only a boy. You seem so much like a child. Do you know anything? Do you even know how old you are? Finish your beer and let’s move along.”

  Valentine nodded. One hundred weights to a crown, he thought, ten crowns to a royal, and he wondered what he would have said had Shanamir pressed him on the matter of his age. Twenty-eight? Thirty-two? He had no idea. What if he were asked in earnest? Thirty-two, he decided. That had a good sound to it. Yes, I am thirty-two years old, and ten crowns make a royal, and the shining piece that shows the old man and the young one is worth fifty of those.

  3

  The road to Shanamir’s inn led squarely through the heart of Pidruid, across districts that even at this late hour were crowded and hectic. Valentine asked if that was on account of the visit of the Coronal, but Shanamir said no, the city was like this all the time, for it was the major port of the western coast of Zimroel. From here went vessels to every major port of Majipoor: up and down this busy coast, but also across the Inner Sea on the enormous journey to Alhanroel, a voyage requiring the better part of a year, and there was even some commerce with the sparsely populated southern continent, Suvrael, the sun-blasted lair of the King of Dreams. When Valentine thought of the totality of Majipoor he felt oppressed by the weight of the world, the sheer mass of it, and yet he knew that was foolish, for was not Majipoor a light and airy place, a giant bubble of a planet, huge but without much substance, so that one felt forever buoyant, forever afloat? Why this leaden sense of pressure across his back, why these moments of unfounded dismay? He led himself quickly back to an easier mood. Soon he would sleep, and the morning would be a day of new marvels.

  “We cross the Golden Plaza,” said Shanamir, “and on the far side of it we take Water Road, which leads to the piers, and our inn is ten minutes out that way. You’ll find the plaza amazing.”

  Indeed it was, such of it as Valentine was able to see: a vast rectangular space, wide enough to drill two armies in, bordered on all four sides by immense square-topped buildings on whose broad flat faces were inlaid dazzling designs in gold leaf, so that by the evening’s torchlight the great towers blazed with reflected light and were more brilliant than the fireshower trees. But there was no crossing the plaza tonight. A hundred paces from its eastern entrance it was roped off with thick braided cord of red plush, behind which stood troops in the uniform of the Coronal’s bodyguard, smug, impassive, arms folded across their green-and-gold jerkins. Shanamir leaped from his mount and trotted forward, and spoke quickly with a vendor. When he returned he said angrily, “They have it entirely blocked. May the King of Dreams send them prickly sleep tonight!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Coronal has taken lodging in the mayor’s palace—that’s the tallest building, with the jagged golden swirls on its walls, on the far side over there—and nobody can get near it tonight. We can’t even go around the plaza’s inner rim, because there’s such a mob piled up there, waiting for a glimpse of Lord Valentine. So it’s a detour for us, an hour or more, the long way around. Well, sleep isn’t that important, I suppose. Look, there he is!”

  Shanamir indicated a balcony high on the façade of the mayor’s palace. Figures had emerged on it. At this distance they were no larger than mice, but mice of dignity and grandeur, clad in sumptuous robes; Valentine could see at least that much. There were five of them, and the central personage was surely the Coronal. Shanamir was straining and standing on tiptoe for a better view. Valentine could make out very little: a dark-haired man, possibly bearded, in a heavy white steetmoy-fur robe over a doublet in green or light blue. The Coronal stood at the front of the balcony, spreading his arms toward the crowd, who made the starburst symbol with their outstretched fingers and shouted his name again and again: “Valentine! Valentine! Lord Valentine!”

  And Shanamir, at Valentine’s side, cried out too: “Valentine! Lord Valentine!”

  Valentine felt a fierce shudder of revulsion. “Listen to them!” he muttered. “Yelling as if he’s the Divine Itself, come down for dinner in Pidruid. He’s only a man, isn’t he? When his bowels are full he empties them, yes?”

  Shanamir blinked in shock. “He’s the Coronal!”

  “He means nothing to me, even as I mean less than nothing to him.”

  “He governs. He administers justice. He holds back chaos. You said those things yourself. Aren’t such things worthy of your respect?”

  “Respect, yes. But not my worship.”

  “To worship the king is nothing new. My father has told me of olden times. They had kings as far back as Old Earth itself, and I’ll bet they were worshiped, Valentine, in scenes far more wild than what you see here tonight.”

  “And some were drowned by their own slaves, and some were poisoned by their chief ministers, and some were smothered by their wives, and some were overthrown by the people they pretended to serve, and every last one was buried and forgotten.” Valentine felt himself growing surprisingly warm with anger. He spat in disgust. “And many lands on Old Earth got along without kings altogether. Why do we need them on Majipoor? These expensive Coronals, and the weird old Pontifex hiding in his Labyrinth, and the sender of bad dreams out of Suvrael—No, Shanamir, I may be too simple to understand it, but it makes no sense to me. This frenzy! These screams of delight! No one screams delight, I’ll wager, when the Mayor of Pidruid rides through the streets.”

  “We need kings,” Shanamir insisted. “This world is too big to be ruled by mayors alone. We need great and potent symbols, monarchs who are almost like gods, to hold things together. Look. Look.” The boy pointed toward the balcony. “Up there, that little figure in the white robe: the Coronal of Majipoor. You feel nothing go shivering down your back when I say that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You get no thrill, knowing that there are twenty billion people on this world and only one is Coronal, and that tonight you behold him with your own eyes, something which you will never do again? You feel no awe?”

  “None.”

  “You’re a strange one, Valentine. I’ve never met anyone like you at all. How could anyone be untouched by the sight of the Coronal?”

  “I am,” said Valentine, shrugging, a little puzzled by it himself. “Come, let’s get out of here. This mob tires me. Let’s find the inn.”

  It was a long journey around the plaza, for all streets ran into it but few ran parallel to it, and Valentine and Shanamir had to move in ever-widening circles while trying to proceed westward, with the train of mounts clopping placidly wherever Shanamir led. But at last they emerged from a district of hotels and fine shops into one of warehouses and lofts, and approached the edge of the waterfront, and came finally to a weatherbeaten inn of warped black timbers and frayed thatching, with stables to the rear. Shanamir housed his beasts and went through a courtyard to the innkeeper’s quarters, leaving Valentine alone in the shadows. He waited a long while. It seemed to him that even here he could hear the blurred and muffled cries: “Valentine…Valentine…Lord Valentine!” But it meant nothing to him that multitudes were crying his name, for it was the name of another.

  Shanamir returned in time, sprinting lightly and silently across the yard.

  “It’s arranged. Give me some money.”

  “The fifty?”

  “Smaller. Much smaller. A half-crown or so.”

  Valentine groped for coins, sorted through them by dim lamplight, handed several well-worn pieces to Shanamir. “For the lodging?” he aske
d.

  “To bribe the doorkeeper,” Shanamir replied. “Places to sleep are hard to come by tonight. Crowding in one more means less room for everybody, and if someone counts heads and complains, it’s the doorkeeper must back us up. Follow me and say nothing.”

  They went in. The place smelled of salt air and mildew. Just within, a fat grayish-faced Hjort sat like an enormous toad at a desk, arranging playing-cards in patterns. The rough-skinned creature barely looked up. Shanamir laid the coins before him and the Hjort signaled with an almost imperceptible flicker of its head. Onward, to a long narrow windowless room, lit by three widely spaced glowfloats that yielded a hazy reddish light. A row of mattresses spanned the length of the room, one close by the next on the floor, and nearly all of them were occupied. “Here,” Shanamir said, nudging one with the tip of his boot. He stripped off his outer clothes and lay down, leaving room for Valentine. “Dream well,” the boy said.

  “Dream well,” said Valentine, and kicked off his boots and shed his top-garments, and dropped down beside him. Distant shouts echoed in his ears, or perhaps in his mind. It astonished him how weary he was. There might be dreams tonight, yes, and he would watch carefully for them so that he could sift them for meaning, but first there would be deep sleep, the sleep of the utterly exhausted. And in the morning? A new day. Anything might befall. Anything.

  4

  There was a dream, of course, somewhere toward the depth of the night. Valentine placed himself at a distance from it and watched it unfold, as he had been taught from childhood. Dreams held great significance; they were messages from the Powers that ruled the world, by which one was to guide one’s life; they were ignored only at one’s peril, for they were manifestations of the deepest truth. Valentine saw himself crossing a vast purple plain under a baleful purple sky and a swollen amber sun. He was alone and his face was drawn, his eyes were tense and strained. As he marched, ugly fissures opened in the ground, gaping cracks that were bright orange within, and things popped forth like children’s toys popping from a box, laughing shrilly at him and swiftly retreating into the fissures as they closed.