Valentine Pontifex Read online

  Free, if only for an hour or two! The Coronal threw his head back and laughed as he had not laughed in a long while, and slapped his mount’s flank, and sped across the meadows, moving so swiftly that the hooves of his great purple beast seemed scarcely to touch the myriad blossoms all about.

  Ah, this was the life!

  He glanced over his shoulder. The fantastic bewildering pile of the Castle was diminishing rapidly behind him, though it still seemed immense at this distance, stretching over half the horizon, an incomprehensibly huge edifice of some forty thousand rooms that clung like some vast monster to the summit of the Mount. He could not remember any occasion since his restoration to the throne when he had been out of that castle without his bodyguard. Not even once.

  Well, he was out of it now. Valentine looked off to his left, where the thirty-mile-high crag that was Castle Mount sloped away at a dizzying angle, and saw the pleasure-city of High Morpin gleaming below, a webwork of airy golden threads. Ride down there, spend a day at the games? Why not? He was free! Ride on beyond, if he chose, and stroll in the gardens of Tolingar Barrier, among the halatingas and tanigales and sithereels, and come back with a yellow alabandina flower in his cap as a cockade? Why not? The day was his. Ride to Furible in time for the feeding-time of the stone birds, ride to Stee and sip golden wine atop Thimin Tower, ride to Bombifale or Peritole or Banglecode—

  His mount seemed equal to any such labor. It carried him hour after hour without fatigue. When he came to High Morpin he tethered it at Confalume Fountain, where shafts of tinted water slender as spears shot hundreds of feet into the air while maintaining, by some ancient magic, their rigid shapes, and on foot he strode along the streets of closely woven golden cable until he came to the place of the mirror slides, where he and Voriax had tested their skills so often when they were boys. But when he went out on the glittering slides no one took any notice of him, as though they felt it rude to stare at a Coronal doing the slides, or as though he were still somehow cloaked by that strange invisibility. That seemed odd, but he was not greatly troubled by it. When he was done with the slides he thought he might go on to the power tunnels or the juggernauts, but then it seemed just as pleasing to continue his journey, and a moment later he was upon his mount once more, and riding on to Bombifale. In that ancient and most lovely of cities, where curving walls of the deepest burnt-orange sandstone were topped with pale towers tapering to elegant points, they had come to him one day long ago when he had been on holiday alone, five of them, his friends, and found him in a tavern of vaulted onyx and polished alabaster, and when he greeted them with surprise and laughter they responded by kneeling to him and making the starburst sign and crying, “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!” To which his first thought was that he was being mocked, for he was not the king but the king’s younger brother, and he knew he never would be king, and did not want to be. And though he was a man who did not get angry easily, he grew angry then, that his friends should intrude on him with this cruel nonsense. But then he saw how pale their faces were, how strange their eyes, and his anger left him, and grief and fear entered his soul: and that was how he learned that Voriax his brother was dead and he had been named Coronal in his place. In Bombifale this day ten years later, it seemed to Valentine that every third man he met had the face of Voriax, black-bearded and hard-eyed and ruddy-faced, and that troubled him, so he left Bombifale quickly.

  He did not stop again, for there was so much to see, so many hundreds of miles to traverse. He went on, past one city and another in a serene untroubled way, as if he were floating, as if he were flying. Now and again he had an astounding view from the brink of some precipice of all the Mount spread out below him, its Fifty Cities somehow visible every one at once, and the innumerable foothill towns too, and the Six Rivers, and the broad plain of Alhanroel sweeping off to the faraway Inner Sea—such splendor, such immensity. Majipoor! Surely it was the most beautiful of all the worlds to which mankind had spread in the thousands of years of the great movement outward from Old Earth. And all given into his hand, all placed in his charge, a responsibility from which he would never shrink.

  But as he rode onward an unexpected mystery began to impinge upon his soul. The air grew dark and cold, which was strange, for on Castle Mount the climate was forever controlled to yield an eternal balmy springtime. Then something like chill spittle struck him on the cheek, and he searched about for a challenger, and saw none, and was struck again, and again: snow, he realized finally, sweeping hard against him on the breast of the frosty wind. Snow, on Castle Mount? Harsh winds?

  And worse: the earth was groaning like a monster in labor. His mount, which had never disobeyed him, now reared back in fear, made a weird whinnying sound, shook its heavy head in slow, ponderous dismay. Valentine heard the booming of distant thunder, and closer at hand a strange cracking noise, and he saw giant furrows appearing in the ground. Everything was madly heaving and churning. An earthquake? The entire Mount was whipping about like a dragon-ship’s mast when the hot dry winds blew from the south. The sky itself, black and leaden, took on sudden weight.

  What is this? Oh, good Lady my mother, what is happening on Castle Mount?

  Valentine clung desperately to his bucking, panicky animal. The whole world seemed to be shattering, crumbling, sliding, flowing. It was his task to hold it together, clutching its giant continents close against his breast, keeping the seas in their beds, holding back the rivers that rose in ravening fury against the helpless cities—

  And he could not sustain it all.

  It was too much for him. Mighty forces thrust whole provinces aloft, and set them clashing against their neighbors. Valentine reached forth to keep them in their places, wishing he had iron hoops with which to bind them. But he could not do it. The land shivered and rose and split, and black clouds of dust covered the face of the sun, and he was powerless to quell that awesome convulsion. One man alone could not bind this vast planet and halt its sundering. He called his comrades to his aid. “Lisamon! Elidath!”

  No response. He called again, and again, but his voice was lost in the booming and the grinding.

  All stability had gone from the world. It was as though he were riding the mirror slides in High Morpin, where you had to dance and hop lively to stay upright as the whirling slides tilted and jerked, but that was a game and this was true chaos, the roots of the world uprooted. The heaving tossed him down and rolled him over and over, and he dug his fingers fiercely into the soft yielding earth to keep from sliding into the crevasses that opened beside him. Out of those yawning cracks came terrifying sounds of laughter, and a purple glow that seemed to rise from a sun that the earth had swallowed. Angry faces floated in the air above him, faces he almost recognized, but they shifted about disconcertingly as he studied them, eyes becoming noses, noses becoming ears. Then behind those nightmare faces he saw another that he knew, shining dark hair, gentle warm eyes. The Lady of the Isle, the sweet mother.

  “It is enough,” she said. “Awaken now, Valentine!”

  “And am I dreaming, then?”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  “Then I should stay, and learn what I can from this dream!”

  “You have learned enough, I think. Awaken now.”

  Yes. It was enough: any more such knowledge might make an end of him. As he had been taught long ago, he brought himself upward from this unexpected sleep and sat up, blinking, struggling to shed his grogginess and confusion. Images of titanic cataclysm still reverberated in his soul; but gradually he perceived that all was peaceful here. He lay on a richly brocaded couch in a high-vaulted room all green and gold. What had halted the earthquake? Where was his mount? Who had brought him here? Ah, they had! Beside him crouched a pale, lean, white-haired man with a ragged scar running the length of one cheek. Sleet. And Tunigorn standing just to the rear, frowning, heavy eyebrows contracting into a single furry ridge. “Calm, calm, calm,” Sleet was saying. “It’s all right, now. You’re aw
ake.”

  Awake? A dream, then, only a dream?

  So it would seem. He was not on Castle Mount at all. There had been no snowstorm, no earthquake, no clouds of dust blotting out the sun. A dream, yes! But such a terrible dream, frighteningly vivid and compelling, so powerful that he found it difficult now to return to reality.

  “Where is this place?” Valentine asked. “Labyrinth, lordship.”

  Where? The Labyrinth? What, then, had he been spirited away from Castle Mount while he slept? Valentine felt sweat bursting from his brow. The Labyrinth? Ah, yes, yes. The truth of it closed on him like a band on his throat. The Labyrinth, yes. He remembered, now. The state visit, of which this was, the Divine be thanked, the final night. That ghastly banquet still to endure. He could not hide from it any longer. The Labyrinth, the Labyrinth, the confounded Labyrinth: he was in it, down in the bottommost level of all. The walls of the suite glowed with handsome murals of the Castle, the Mount, the Fifty Cities: scenes so lovely that they were a mockery to him now. So distant from Castle Mount, so far from the sun’s sweet warmth—

  Ah, what a sour business, he thought, to awaken from a dream of destruction and calamity, only to find yourself in the most dismal place in the world!

  SIX HUNDRED MILES EAST OF the brilliant crystalline city of Dulorn, in the marshy valley known as Prestimion Vale, where a few hundred families of Ghayrogs raised lusavender and rice on widely scattered plantations, it was getting to be the midyear harvest season. The glossy, swollen, black lusavender pods, nearly ripe, hung in thick clusters at the ends of curving stems that rose from the half-submerged fields.

  For Aximaan Threysz, the oldest and shrewdest of the lusavender farmers of Prestimion Vale, there was an excitement about this harvest like nothing she had felt in decades. The experiment in protoplast augmentation that she had begun three seasons back under the guidance of the government agricultural agent was reaching its culmination now. This season she had given her entire plantation over to the new kind of lusavender: and there were the pods, twice normal size, ready to be stripped! No one else in the Vale had dared to take the risk, not until Aximaan Threysz had checked things out. And now she had; and soon her success would be confirmed; and they would all weep, oh, yes! when she came to market a week ahead of everyone else with double her usual volume of seed!

  As she stood deep in mud by the edge of her fields, pressing her finger-ridges into the closest pods and trying to determine how soon to start the picking, one of her eldest son’s boys came running up with a message: “Father says to tell you he’s just heard in town that the agricultural agent’s on his way from Mazadone! He’s reached Helkaplod already. Tomorrow he’ll ride to Sijaneel.”

  “Then he’ll be in the Vale by Twoday,” she said. “Good. Perfect!” Her forked tongue began to flicker. “Go, child, run back to your father. Tell him we’ll hold the feast for the agent on Seaday and we’ll begin the harvest on Fourday. And I want the whole family to gather in the plantation house in half an hour. Go, now! Run.”

  The plantation had been in the family of Aximaan Threysz since Lord Confalume’s time. It covered an irregularly triangular area that stretched for five miles or so along the banks of Havilbove Fluence, jigged in a southeasterly way down to the outskirts of Mazadone Forest Preserve, and swung by roundabout curves back toward the river to the north. Within that zone, Aximaan Threysz ruled as lord absolute over her five sons and nine daughters, her uncountable grandchildren and the twenty-odd Liimen and Vroons who were her farmhands. When Aximaan Threysz said it was seedtime, they went out and seeded. When Aximaan Threysz said it was harvest time, they went out and reaped. At the great house at the edge of the androdragma grove, dinner was served at the time Aximaan Threysz came to table, whenever that time happened to be. Even the family sleeping schedules were subject to Aximaan Threysz’s decrees: for Ghayrogs are hibernators, but she could not have the whole family asleep at once. The eldest son knew he must always be awake during the first six weeks of his mother’s annual winter rest; the eldest daughter took command for the remaining six weeks. Aximaan Threysz assigned sleep-times to the other family members according to her sense of what was appropriate to the plantation’s needs. No one ever questioned her. Even when she was young—an impossibly long time ago, when Ossier was Pontifex and Lord Tyeveras had the Castle—she had been the one to whom all others turned, even her father, even her mate, in time of crisis. She had outlived both of those, and some of her offspring as well, and many a Coronal had come and gone on Castle Mount, and still Aximaan Threysz went on and on. Her thick scaly hide had lost its high gloss and was purplish with age now, the writhing fleshy serpents of her hair had faded from jet black to pale gray, her chilly unblinking green eyes were clouded and milky, but yet she moved unceasingly through the routines of the farm.

  Nothing of any value could be raised on her land except rice and lusavender, and even those were not easy. The rainstorms of the far north found easy access to Dulorn Province down the great funnel of the Rift, and, though the city of Dulorn itself lay in a dry zone, the territory to its west, amply watered and well drained, was fertile and rich. But the district around Prestimion Vale on the eastern side of the Rift was another sort of place entirely, dank and swampy, its soil a heavy bluish muck. With careful timing, though, it was possible to plant rice at the end of winter just ahead of the spring floods, and to put in lusavender in late spring and again at the end of autumn. No one in the region knew the rhythm of the seasons better than Aximaan Threysz, and only the most rash of farmers would set his seedlings out before word had come that she had begun her planting.

  Imperious though she was, overwhelming in her prestige and authority, Aximaan Threysz nevertheless had one trait that the people of the Vale found incomprehensible: she deferred to the provincial agricultural agent as though he were the fount of all knowledge and she the merest apprentice. Two or three times a year the agent came out from the provincial capital of Mazadone, riding a circuit through the swamplands, and his first stop in the Vale was always Aximaan Threysz’s plantation. She housed him in the great house, she breached the casks of fireshower wine and brandied niyk, she sent her grandsons off to Havilbove Fluence to catch the tasty little hiktigans that scurried between the rocks of the rapids, she ordered the frozen bidlak steaks to be thawed and roasted over logs of aromatic thwale. And when the feasting was done she drew the agent aside and talked far into the night with him of such things as fertilizers and seedling grafts and harvesting machinery, while her daughters Heynok and Jarnok sat by, taking down notes of every word.

  It mystified everyone that Aximaan Threysz, who surely knew more about the planting of lusavender than anyone who had ever lived, would care a straw for what some little government employee could tell her. But her family knew why. “We have our ways, and we become set in our ways,” she often said. “We do what we have done before, because it has worked for us before. We plant our seeds, we tend our seedlings, we watch over the ripening, we harvest our crop, and then we begin all over in the same way. And if each crop is no smaller than the crop before, we think we are doing well. But in fact we are failing, if we merely equal what we have done before. There is no standing still in this world: to stand still is to sink into the mud.”

  So it was that Aximaan Threysz subscribed to the agricultural journals, and sent her grandchildren off now and then to the university, and listened most carefully to what the provincial agent might have to say. And year by year the method of her farming underwent small changes, and year by year the sacks of lusavender seeds that Aximaan Threysz shipped off to market in Mazadone were greater in number than the year before, and the shining grains of rice were heaped ever higher in her storehouses. For there was always some better way of doing things to be learned, and Aximaan Threysz made sure she learned it. “We are Majipoor,” she said again and again. “The great cities rest on foundations of grain. Without us, Ni-moya and Pidruid and Khyntor and Piliplok would be wastelands. And the cities grow ev
er larger every year: so we must work ever harder to feed them, is that not so? We have no choice in that: it is the will of the Divine. Is that not so?”

  She had outlasted fifteen or twenty agents by now. They came out as young men, brimming over with the latest notions but often shy about offering them to her. “I don’t know what I could possibly teach you,” they liked to tell her. “I’m the one who should be learning from you, Aximaan Threysz!” So she had to go through the same routine again and again, putting them at their ease, convincing them that she was sincerely interested in hearing of the latest techniques.

  It was always a nuisance when the old agent retired and some youngster took over. As she moved deeper into vast old age it became ever harder to establish any sort of useful relationship with the new ones until several seasons had gone by. But that had not been a problem when Caliman Hayn had turned up two years ago. He was a young human, thirty or forty or fifty years old—anyone short of seventy seemed young to Aximaan Threysz these days—with a curiously blunt, offhand manner that was much to her liking. He showed no awe for her and did not seem interested in flattering her. “They tell me you are the farmer most willing to try new things,” he said brusquely, no more than ten minutes after they had met. “What would you say to a process that can double the size of lusavender seeds without harming their flavor?”

  “I would say that I am being gulled,” she said. “It sounds considerably too good to be true.”