Lord Valentine's Castle Read online

  The day was warm now and growing quite humid, although a pleasant breeze blew toward shore. Valentine was hungry again. At a stand at the edge of the quay he bought, for a couple of coppers, a meal of strips of raw blue-fleshed fish marinated in a hot spicy sauce and served on slivers of wood. He washed it back with a beaker of fireshower wine, startling golden stuff that tasted hotter even than the sauce. Then he thought of returning to the inn. But he realized that he knew neither the name of the inn nor the name of its street, only that it lay a short distance inland from the waterfront district. Small loss if he never found it, for he had no possessions except those he carried on him; but the only people he knew in all of Pidruid were Shanamir and the jugglers, and he did not want to part from them so soon.

  Valentine started back and promptly lost himself in a maze of indistinguishable alleyways and streetlets that ran back and forth across Water Road. Three times he found inns that seemed the right one, but each, when he approached it closely, proved to be some other. An hour passed, or more, and it grew to be early afternoon. Valentine understood that it would be impossible for him to find the inn, and there was a pang of sadness at that, for he thought of Carabella and the touch of her fingers to the side of his arm, and the quickness of her hands as she caught the knives, and the brightness of her dark eyes. But what is lost, he thought, is lost, and no use weeping over it. He would find himself a new inn and new friends before dark.

  And then he turned a corner and discovered what must surely be Pidruid market.

  It was a vast enclosed space nearly as huge as the Golden Plaza, but there were no towering palaces and hotels with golden façades here, only an endless sprawl of tile-roofed sheds and open stockyards and cramped booths. Here was every fragrance and stink in the world, and half the produce of the universe for sale. Valentine plunged in, delighted, fascinated. Sides of meat hung from great hooks in one shed. Barrels of spice, spilling their contents, occupied another. In one stockyard were giddy spinner-birds, standing taller than Skandars on their preposterous bright legs, pecking and kicking at one another while dealers in eggs and wool bargained over them. In another were tanks of shining serpents, coiling and twisting like streaks of angry flame; nearby was a place where small sea-dragons, gutted and pithed, lay stacked for sale in foul-smelling heaps. Here was a place of public scribes, doing letters for the unlettered, and here a moneychanger deftly haggling for currencies of a dozen worlds, and here a row of sausage-stands, fifty of them and identical, with identical-looking Liimen side by side tending their smoky fires and twirling their laden skewers.

  And fortunetellers, and sorcerers, and jugglers, though not the jugglers Valentine knew, and in a clear space squatted a storyteller, relating for coppers some involuted and all but incomprehensible adventure of Lord Stiamot, the famed Coronal of eight thousand years ago, whose deeds now were the stuff of myth. Valentine listened for five minutes but could make no sense of the tale, which held fifteen or twenty off-duty porters in rapture. He went on, past a booth where a golden-eyed Vroon with a silver flute played slinky tunes to charm some three-headed creature in a wicker basket, past a grinning boy of about ten who challenged him to a game involving shells and beads, past an aisle of vendors who were selling banners that bore the Coronal’s starburst, past a fakir who hovered suspended over a vat of some nasty-looking hot oil, past an avenue of dream-speakers and a passageway thronged with drug-dealers, past the place of the interpreters and the place of the jewel-sellers, and at last, after turning a corner where all manner of cheap garments were for sale, he arrived at the stockyard where mounts were sold.

  The sturdy purple beasts were lined up flank to flank by the hundreds, maybe even the thousands, standing impassively and peering without interest at what appeared to be an auction taking place before their noses. Valentine found the auction as difficult to follow as the storyteller’s tale of Lord Stiamot: buyers and sellers faced each other in two long rows, and made hacking gestures across their wrists at one another, supplementing those movements with grimaces, the banging together of fists, and the sudden outward thrust of elbows. Nothing was said, and yet much evidently was communicated, because scribes stationed along the row constantly scribbled deeds of sale that were validated by thumb-chops in green ink, and frantic clerks affixed tags stamped with the labyrinth seal of the Pontifex to the haunches of one beast after another. Moving along the line of the auction, Valentine at last came upon Shanamir, hacking and elbowing and banging fists with consummate ferocity. In minutes it was all over, and the boy came bounding out of the line with a whoop of joy. He caught Valentine by the arm and whirled him gleefully about.

  “All sold! All sold! And at a premium price!” He held out a wad of chits that a scribe had given him. “Come with me to the treasury, and then it’s nothing left but play for us! How late did you sleep?”

  “Late, I suppose. The inn was almost empty.”

  “I didn’t have the heart to wake you. You were snoring like a blave. What have you been doing?”

  “Exploring the waterfront, mainly. I stumbled into the marketplace while trying to get back to the inn. It was by luck I came upon you.”

  “Ten minutes more and you’d have missed me forever,” said Shanamir. “Here. This place.” He tugged at Valentine’s wrist and pulled him into a long, brightly lit arcade where clerks behind wickers were changing chits into coins. “Give me the fifty,” Shanamir murmured. “I can have it broken for you here.”

  Valentine produced the thick gleaming coin and stood aside while the boy joined a line. Minutes later Shanamir returned. “These are yours,” he said, dumping into Valentine’s outstretched purse a shower of money, some five-royal pieces and a jingle of crowns. “And these are mine,” the boy said, grinning wickedly and holding up three big fifty-royal pieces of the kind he had just changed for Valentine. He popped them into a moneyband under his jerkin. “A profitable trip, it was. At festival time everyone’s in a fever to spend his money fast. Come, now. Back to the inn, and let’s celebrate with a flask of fireshower wine, eh? The treat’s mine!”

  The inn, it turned out, was no more than fifteen minutes from the market, on a street that suddenly looked familiar as they entered it. Valentine suspected that he had come within a block or two of it in his fruitless quest. No matter: he was here, and with Shanamir. The boy, relieved at being rid of his animals and excited over the price he had had for them, chattered on and on about what he would do in Pidruid before he returned to his countryside home—the dancing, the games, the drinking, the shows.

  As they sat in the tavern of the inn at work on Shanamir’s wine, Sleet and Carabella appeared. “May we join you?” Sleet asked.

  Valentine said to Shanamir, “These are jugglers, members of a Skandar troupe here to play in the parade. I met them this morning.” He made introductions. They took seats and Shanamir offered them drinks.

  “Have you been to market?” said Sleet.

  “Been and done,” Shanamir said. “A good price.”

  “And now?” Carabella asked.

  “The festival for a few days,” said the boy. “And home to Falkynkip, I suppose.” He looked a little crestfallen at the thought.

  “And you?” Carabella said, glancing at Valentine. “Do you have plans?”

  “To see the festival.”

  “And then?”

  “Whatever seems right.”

  They were finished with the wine. Sleet gestured sharply and a second flask appeared. It was poured around generously. Valentine felt his tongue tingling with the heat of the liquor, and his head becoming a little light.

  Carabella said, “Would you think to be a juggler, and join our troupe, then?”

  It startled Valentine. “I have no skill!”

  “You have skill aplenty,” said Sleet. “What you lack is training. That we could supply, Carabella and I. You would learn the trade quickly. I take an oath on it.”

  “And I would travel with you, and live the life of a wandering player, and
go from town to town—is that it?”

  “Exactly.”

  Valentine looked across at Shanamir. The boy’s eyes were shining at the prospect. Valentine could almost feel the pressure of his excitement, his envy.

  “But what is all this about?” Valentine demanded. “Why invite a stranger, a novice, an ignoramus like me, to become one of your number?”

  Carabella signaled to Sleet, who quickly left the table. She said, “Zalzan Kavol will explain. It is a necessity, not a caprice. We are shorthanded, Valentine, and we have need of you.” She added, “Besides, have you anything other to do? You seem adrift in this city. We offer you companionship as well as a livelihood.”

  A moment and Sleet returned with the giant Skandar. Zalzan Kavol was an awesome figure, massive, towering. He lowered himself with difficulty into a seat at their table: it creaked alarmingly beneath his bulk. Skandars came from some windswept, icy world far away, and though they had been settled on Majipoor for thousands of years, working in rough trades needing great strength or unusual quickness of eye, they had a way of eternally looking angry and uncomfortable in Majipoor’s warm climate. Perhaps it was only a matter of their natural facial features, Valentine thought, but he found Zalzan Kavol and others of his kind an offputtingly bleak tribe.

  The Skandar poured himself a stiff drink with his two inner arms and spread the outer pair wide across the table as though he were taking possession of it. In a harsh rumbling voice he said, “I watched you do the knives with Sleet and Carabella this morning. You can serve the purpose.”

  “Which is?”

  “I need a third human juggler, and in a hurry. You know what the new Coronal has lately decreed concerning public entertainers?”

  Valentine smiled and shrugged.

  Zalzan Kavol said, “It is foolishness and stupidity, but the Coronal is young and I suppose must let fly some wild shafts. It has been decreed that in all troupes of performers made up of more than three individuals, one third of the troupe must be Majipoori citizens of human birth, this to be effective as of this month.”

  “A decree like that,” said Carabella, “can accomplish nothing but to set race against race, on a world where many races have lived in peace for thousands of years.”

  Zalzan Kavol scowled. “Nevertheless the decree exists. Some jackal in the Castle must have told this Lord Valentine that the other races are growing too numerous, that the humans of Majipoor are going hungry when we work. Foolishness, and dangerous. Ordinarily no one would pay attention to such a decree, but this is the festival of the Coronal, and if we are to be licensed to perform, we must obey the rules, however idiotic. My brothers and I have earned our keep as jugglers for years, and done no harm to any human by it, but now we must comply. So I have found Sleet and Carabella in Pidruid, and we are working them into our routines. Today is Twoday. Four days hence we perform in the Coronal’s parade, and I must have a third human. Will you apprentice yourself to us, Valentine?”

  “How could I learn juggling in four days?”

  “You will be merely an apprentice,” said the Skandar. “We will find something of a juggling nature for you to do in the grand parade that will disgrace neither yourself nor us. The law does not, as I see it, require all members of the troupe to have equal responsibilities or skills. But three of us must be human.”

  “And after the festival?”

  “Come with us from town to town.”

  “You know nothing about me, and you invite me to share your lives?”

  “I know nothing about you and I want to know nothing about you. I need a juggler of your race. I’ll pay your room and board wherever we go, and ten crowns a week besides. Yes?”

  Carabella’s eyes had an odd glint, as though she were telling him, You can ask twice that wage and get it, Valentine. But the money was unimportant. He would have enough to eat and a place to sleep, and he would be with Carabella and Sleet, who were two of the three human beings he knew in this city, and, he realized with some confusion, in all the world. For there was a vacancy in him where a past should be: he had hazy notions of parents, and cousins and sisters, and a childhood somewhere in eastern Zimroel, and schooling and travels, but none of it seemed real to him, nothing had density and texture and substance. And there was a vacancy in him where a future should be, too. These jugglers promised to fill it. But yet—

  “One condition,” Valentine said.

  Zalzan Kavol looked displeased. “Which is?”

  Valentine nodded toward Shanamir. “I think this boy is tired of raising mounts in Falkynkip, and may want to travel more widely. I ask that you offer him a place in your troupe as well—”

  “Valentine!” the boy cried.

  “—as groom, or valet, or even a juggler if he has the art,” Valentine went on, “and that if he is willing to go with us, you accept him along with me. Will you do that?”

  Zalzan Kavol was silent a moment, as if in calculation, and there was a barely audible growling sound from somewhere deep within his shaggy form. At length he said, “Have you any interest in joining us, boy?”

  “Have I? Have I?”

  “I feared as much,” said the Skandar morosely. “Then it is done. We hire the both of you at thirteen crowns the week with room and board. Done?”

  “Done,” said Valentine.

  “Done!” cried Shanamir.

  Zalzan Kavol knocked back the last of the fireshower wine. “Sleet, Carabella, take this stranger to the courtyard and begin making a juggler out of him. You come with me, boy. I want you to have a look at our mounts.”

  6

  They went outside. Carabella darted off to the sleeping-quarters to fetch equipment. Watching her run, Valentine took pleasure in her graceful movements, imagining the play of supple muscles beneath her garments. Sleet plucked blue-white berries from one of the courtyard vines and popped them into his mouth.

  “What are they?” Valentine asked.

  Sleet tossed him one. “Thokkas. In Narabal, where I was born, a thokka vine will sprout in the morning and be as high as a house by afternoon. Of course the soil bursts with life in Narabal, and the rain falls every dawn. Another?”

  “Please.”

  With a deft, quick wrist-flip Sleet chucked a berry over. It was the smallest of gestures, but effective. Sleet was an economical man, bird-light, without an ounce of excess flesh, his gestures precise, his voice dry and controlled. “Chew the seeds,” he advised Valentine. “They promote virility.” He managed a thin laugh.

  Carabella returned, bearing a great many colored rubber balls that she juggled briskly as she crossed the yard. When she reached Valentine and Sleet she flipped one of the balls to Valentine and three to Sleet, without breaking stride. Three she retained.

  “Not knives?” Valentine asked.

  “Knives are showy things. Today we deal in fundamentals,” Sleet said. “We deal in the philosophy of the art. Knives would be a distraction.”

  “Philosophy?”

  “Do you think juggling’s a mere trick?” the little man asked, sounding wounded. “An amusement for the gapers? A means of picking up a crown or two at a provincial carnival? It is all those things, yes, but first it is a way of life, friend, a creed, a species of worship.”

  “And a kind of poetry,” said Carabella.

  Sleet nodded. “Yes, that too. And a mathematics. It teaches calmness, control, balance, a sense of the placement of things and the underlying structure of motion. There is silent music to it. Above all there is discipline. Do I sound pretentious?”

  “He means to sound pretentious,” Carabella said. There was mischief in her eyes. “But everything he says is true. Are you ready to begin?”

  Valentine nodded.

  Sleet said, “Make yourself calm. Cleanse your mind of all needless thought and calculation. Travel to the center of your being and hold yourself there.”

  Valentine planted his feet flat on the ground, took three deep breaths, relaxed his shoulders so that he could not feel h
is dangling arms, and waited.

  “I think,” said Carabella, “that this man lives most of the time at the center of his being. Or else that he is without a center and so can never be far from it.”

  “Are you ready?” Sleet asked.

  “Ready.”

  “We will teach you basics, one small thing at a time. Juggling is a series of small, discrete motions done in quick sequence that give the appearance of constant flow and simultaneity. Simultaneity is an illusion, friend, when you are juggling and even when you are not. All events happen one at a time.” Sleet smiled coldly. He seemed to be speaking from ten thousand miles away. “Close your eyes, Valentine. Orientation in space and time is essential. Think of where you are and where you stand in relation to the world.”

  Valentine pictured Majipoor, mighty ball hanging in space, half of it or more than half engulfed by the Great Sea. He saw himself standing rooted at Zimroel’s edge with the sea behind him and a continent unrolling before him, and the Inner Sea punctuated by the Isle of Sleep, and Alhanroel beyond, rising on its nether side to the great swollen bulge of Castle Mount, and the sun overhead, yellow with a bronze-green tint, sending blistering rays down on dusty Suvrael and into the tropics, and warming everything else, and the moons somewhere on the far side of things, and the stars farther out, and the other worlds, the worlds from which the Skandars came and the Hjorts and the Liimen and all the rest, even the world from which his own folk had emigrated, Old Earth, fourteen thousand years ago, a small blue world absurdly tiny when compared to Majipoor, far away, half-forgotten in some other corner of the universe, and he journeyed back down across the stars to this world, this continent, this city, this inn, this courtyard, this small plot of moist yielding soil in which his boots were rooted, and told Sleet he was ready.