Valentine Pontifex Read online

  Then Hornkast spoke: the high spokesman of the Pontificate, plump, solemn, the true ruler of the Labyrinth in these years of the senility of the Pontifex Tyeveras. His theme, he declared, was the grand processional. Valentine sat to attention at once: for in the past year he had thought of little else than the processional, that far-ranging ceremonial journey in which the Coronal must go forth upon Majipoor and show himself to the people, and receive from them their homage, their allegiance, their love.

  “It may seem to some,” said Hornkast, “a mere pleasure jaunt, a trivial and meaningless holiday from the cares of office. Not so! Not so! For it is the person of the Coronal—the actual, physical person, not a banner, not a flag, not a portrait—that binds all the far-flung provinces of the world to a common loyalty. And it is only through periodic contact with the actual presence of that royal person that that loyalty is renewed.”

  Valentine frowned and looked away. Through his mind there surged a sudden disturbing image: the landscape of Majipoor sundered and upheaved, and one solitary man desperately wrestling with the splintered terrain, striving to thrust everything back into place.

  “For the Coronal,” Hornkast went on, “is the embodiment of Majipoor. The Coronal is Majipoor personified. He is the world; the world is the Coronal. And so when he undertakes the grand processional, as you, Lord Valentine, now will do for the first time since your glorious restoration, he is not only going forth to the world, but he is going forth to himself—to a voyage into his own soul, to an encounter with the deepest roots of his identity—”

  Was it so? Of course. Of course. Hornkast, he knew, was simply spouting standard rhetoric, oratorical noises of a sort that Valentine had had to endure all too often. And yet, this time the words seemed to trigger something in him, seemed to open some great dark tunnel of mysteries. That dream—the cold wind blowing across Castle Mount, the groans of the earth, the shattered landscape—The Coronal is the embodiment of Majipoor—he is the world—

  Once in his reign already that unity had been broken, when Valentine, thrust from power by treachery, stripped of his memory and even of his own body, had been hurled into exile. Was it to happen again? A second overthrow, a second downfall? Or was something even more dreadful imminent, something far more serious than the fate of one single man?

  He tasted the unfamiliar taste of fear. Banquet or no, Valentine knew he should have gone at once for a dream-speaking. Some grim knowledge was striving to break through to his awareness, beyond all doubt. Something was wrong within the Coronal—which was the same as saying something was wrong in the world—

  “My lord?” It was Autifon Deliamber. The little Vroonish wizard said, “It is time, my lord, for you to offer the final toast.”

  “What? When?”

  “Now, my lord.”

  “Ah. Indeed,” Valentine said vaguely. “The final toast, yes.”

  He rose and let his gaze journey throughout the great room, into its most shadowy depths. And a sudden strangeness came upon him, for he realized that he was entirely unprepared. He had little notion of what he was to say, or to whom he should direct it, or even—really—what he was doing in this place at all. The Labyrinth? Was this in truth the Labyrinth, that loathsome place of shadows and mildew? Why was he here? What did these people want him to do? Perhaps this was merely another dream, and he had never left Castle Mount. He did not know. He did not understand anything.

  Something will come, he thought. I need only wait. But he waited, and nothing came, except deeper strangeness. He felt a throbbing in his forehead, a humming in his ears. Then he experienced a powerful sense of himself here in the Labyrinth as occupying a place at the precise center of the world, the core of the whole gigantic globe. But some irresistible force was pulling him from that place. Between one moment and the next his soul went surging from him as though it were a great mantle of light, streaming upward through the many layers of the Labyrinth to the surface and then reaching forth to encompass all the immensity of Majipoor, even to the distant coasts of Zimroel and sun-blackened Suvrael, and the unknown expanse of the Great Sea on the far side of the planet. He wrapped the world like a glowing veil. In that dizzying moment he felt that he and the planet were one, that he embodied in himself the twenty billion people of Majipoor, humans and Skandars and Hjorts and Metamorphs and all the rest, moving within him like the corpuscles of his blood. He was everywhere at once: he was all the sorrow in the world, and all the joy, and all the yearning, and all the need. He was everything. He was a boiling universe of contradictions and conflicts. He felt the heat of the desert and the warm rain of the tropics and the chill of the high peaks. He laughed and wept and died and made love and ate and drank and danced and fought and rode wildly through unknown hills and toiled in the fields and cut a path through thick vine-webbed jungles. In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. Faces without eyes hovered before him, grinning, leering. Bony attenuated hands fluttered in the air. Choirs sang discordant hymns. All at once, at once, at once, a terrible lunatic simultaneity.

  He stood in silence, bewildered, lost, as the room reeled wildly about him. “Propose the toast, lordship,” Deliamber seemed to be saying over and over. “First to the Pontifex, and then to his aides, and then—”

  Control yourself, Valentine thought. You are Coronal of Majipoor.

  With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination.

  “The toast to the Pontifex, lordship—”

  “Yes. Yes, I know.”

  Phantom images still haunted him. Ghostly fleshless fingers plucked at him. He fought free. Control. Control. Control.

  He felt utterly lost. “The toast, lordship!”

  The toast? The toast? What was that? A ceremony. An obligation upon him. You are Coronal of Majipoor. Yes. He must speak. He must say words to these people.

  “Friends—” he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos.

  “THE CORONAL WANTS TO SEE YOU,” Shanamir said.

  Hissune looked up, startled. For the past hour and a half he had been waiting tensely in a dismal many-columned antechamber with a grotesque bulbous ceiling, wondering what was happening behind the closed doors of Lord Valentine’s suite and whether he was supposed to remain here indefinitely. It was well past midnight, and some ten hours from now the Coronal and his staff was to depart from the Labyrinth on the next leg of the grand processional, unless tonight’s strange events had altered that plan. Hissune still had to make his way all the way up to the outermost ring, gather his possessions and say good-bye to his mother and sisters, and get back here in time to join the outbound party—and fit some sleep into the picture, too. All was in confusion.

  After the collapse of the Coronal, after Lord Valentine had been carried away to his suite, after the banquet hall had been cleared, Hissune and some of the other members of the Coronal’s group had assembled in this drab room nearby. Word had come, after a time, that Lord Valentine was recovering well, and that they were all to wait there for further instructions. Then, one by one, they had been summoned to the Coronal—Tunigorn first, then Ermanar, Asenhart, Shanamir, and the rest, until Hissune was left alone with some members of the Coronal’s guard and a few very minor staff people. He did not feel like asking any of these subalterns what the appropriate thing for him to do might be; but he dared not leave, either, and so he waited, and waited some more, and went on waiting.

  He closed his eyes when they grew raw and began to ache, though he did not sleep. A single image revolved endlessly in his mind: the Coronal beginning to fall, and he and Lisamon Hultin springing from their seats at the same moment to catch him. He was unable to shake from his mind the horror of that sudden astonishing climax to the banquet: the Coronal bemused, pathetic, groping for words and failing to find the right ones, swaying, teetering, falling—

  Of course a Coronal was just as capable of getting himself
drunk and behaving foolishly as anyone else. One of the many things that Hissune’s illicit explorations of the memory-readings in the Register of Souls during the years he worked in the House of Records had taught him was that there was nothing superhuman about the men who wore the starburst crown. So it was altogether possible that this evening Lord Valentine, who seemed so intensely to dislike being in the Labyrinth, had allowed the free-flowing wine to ease that dislike, until, when it was his turn to speak, he was in a drunken muddle.

  But somehow Hissune doubted that it was wine that had muddled the Coronal, even though Lord Valentine had said as much himself. He had been watching the Coronal closely all during the speech-making, and he hadn’t seemed at all drunk then, only convivial, joyous, relaxed. And afterward, when the little Vroonish wizard had brought Lord Valentine back from his swoon by touching his tentacles to him, the Coronal had seemed a trifle shaky, as anyone who had fainted might be, but nevertheless quite clearheaded. Nobody could sober up that fast. No, Hissune thought, more likely it had been something other than drunkenness, some sorcery, some deep sending that had seized Lord Valentine’s spirit just at that moment. And that was terrifying.

  He rose now and went down the winding corridor to the Coronal’s chambers. As he approached the intricately carved door, gleaming with brilliant golden starbursts and royal monograms, it opened and Tunigorn and Ermanar emerged, looking drawn and somber. They nodded to him and Tunigorn, with a quick gesture of his finger, ordered the guards at the door to let him go in.

  Lord Valentine sat at a broad desk of some rare and highly polished blood-colored wood. The Coronal’s big heavy-knuckled hands were spread out before him against the surface of the desk, as though he were supporting himself with them. His face was pale, his eyes seemed to be having difficulty focusing, his shoulders were slumped.

  “My lord—” Hissune began uncertainly, and faltered into silence.

  He remained just within the doorway, feeling awkward, out of place, keenly uncomfortable. Lord Valentine did not seem to have noticed him. The old dream-speaker Tisana was in the room, and Sleet, and the Vroon, but no one said a thing. Hissune was baffled. He had no idea what the etiquette of approaching a tired and obviously ill Coronal might be. Was one supposed to offer one’s kind sympathies, or to pretend that the monarch was in the finest of health? Hissune made the starburst gesture, and getting no response, made it again. He felt his cheeks blazing.

  He searched for some shred of his former youthful self-assurance, and found nothing. Strangely, he seemed to be growing more ill at ease with Lord Valentine, rather than less, the more often he saw the Coronal. That was hard to understand.

  Sleet rescued him at last, saying loudly, “My lord, it is the Initiate Hissune.”

  The Coronal raised his head and stared at Hissune. The depth of fatigue that his fixed and glassy eyes revealed was terrifying. And yet, as Hissune watched in amazement, Lord Valentine drew himself back from the brink of exhaustion the way a man who has cuaght a vine after slipping over the edge of a precipice pulls himself to safety: with a desperate show of unanswerable strength. It was astonishing to see some color come to his cheeks, some animation to his expression. He managed even to project a distinct kingliness, a feeling of command. Hissune, awed, wondered if it might be some trick they learn on Castle Mount, when they are in training to become Coronals—

  “Come closer,” Lord Valentine said.

  Hissune took a couple of steps deeper into the room.

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “My lord—”

  “I can’t allow you to waste time fearing me, Hissune. I have too much work to do. And so do you. Once I believed that you felt absolutely no awe of me at all. Was I wrong?”

  “My lord, it’s only that you look so tired—and I’m tired myself, I suppose—this night has been so strange, for me, for you, for everyone—”

  The Coronal nodded. “A night full of great strangenesses, yes. Is it morning yet? I never know the time, when I’m in this place.”

  “A little past midnight, my lord.”

  “Only a little past midnight? I thought it was almost morning. How long this night has been!” Lord Valentine laughed softly. “But it’s always a little past midnight in the Labyrinth, isn’t it, Hissune? By the Divine, if you could know how I yearn to see the sun again!”

  “My lord—” Deliamber murmured tactfully. “It does indeed grow late, and there is still much to do—”

  “Indeed.” For an instant the Coronal’s eyes flickered into glassiness again. Then, recovering once more, he said, “To business, then. The first item of which is the giving of my thanks. I’d have been badly hurt but for your being there to catch me. You must have been on your way toward me before I went over, eh? Was it that obvious I was about to keel over?”

  Reddening a little, Hissune said, “It was, lordship. At least to me.”

  “Ah.”

  “But I may have been watching you more closely than the others were.”

  “Yes. I dare say you may have been.”

  “I hope your lordship won’t greatly suffer the ill effects of—of—”

  A faint smile appeared on the Coronal’s lips. “I wasn’t drunk, Hissune.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply—I mean—but that is to say—”

  “Not drunk, no. A spell, a sending—who knows? Wine is one thing, and sorcery’s another, and I think I still can tell the difference. It was a dark vision, boy: not the first I’ve had lately. The omens are troublesome. War’s on the wind.”

  “War?” Hissune blurted. The word was unfamiliar, alien, ugly: it hovered in the air like some foul droning insect looking for prey. War? War? Into Hissune’s mind leaped an image eight thousand years old, springing from the cache of memories he had stolen in the Register of Souls: the dry hills of the far northwest ablaze, the sky black with thick coils of rising smoke, in the final awful convulsion of Lord Stiamot’s long war against the Metamorphs. But that was ancient history. There had been no war in all the centuries since, other than the war of restoration. And scarce any lives had been lost in that, by design of Lord Valentine, to whom violence was an abomination. “How can there be war?” Hissune demanded. “We have no wars on Majipoor!”

  “War’s coming, boy!” said Sleet roughly. “And when it does, by the Lady, there’ll be no hiding from it!”

  “But war with whom? This is the most peaceful of worlds. What enemy could there be?”

  “There is one,” Sleet said. “Are you Labyrinth people so sheltered from the real world that you fail to comprehend that?”

  Hissune frowned. “The Metamorphs, you mean?”

  “Aye, the Metamorphs!” Sleet cried. “The filthy Shapeshifters, boy! Did you think we could keep them penned up forever? By the Lady, there’ll be a rampage soon enough!”

  Hissune stared in shock and amazement at the lean little scar-faced man. Sleet’s eyes were shining. He seemed almost to welcome the prospect.

  Shaking his head slowly, Hissune said, “With all respect, High Counsellor Sleet, this makes no sense to me. A few millions of them, against twenty billions of us? They fought that war once, and lost it, and however much they hate us, I don’t think they’re going to try it again.”

  Sleet pointed toward the Coronal, who seemed barely to be listening. “And the time they put their own puppet on Lord Valentine’s throne? What was that if not a declaration of war? Ah, boy, boy, you know nothing! The Shapeshifters have been scheming against us for centuries, and their time is at hand. The Coronal’s own dreams foretell it! By the Lady, the Coronal himself dreams of war!”

  “By the Lady indeed, Sleet,” said the Coronal in a voice of infinite weariness, “there’ll be no war if I can help it, and you know that.”

  “And if you can’t help it, my lord?” Sleet shot back.

  The little man’s chalk-white face was flushed now with excitement; his eyes gleamed, he made tight rapid obsessive gestures with his hands, as though he were juggling invis
ible clubs. It had not occured to Hissune that anyone, even a High Counsellor, spoke so bluntly to Coronals. And perhaps it did not happen often, for Hissune saw something much like anger cross the face of Lord Valentine: Lord Valentine who was reputed never to have known rage, who had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration. Then that anger gave way to the dreadful weariness again, which made the Coronal seem to be a man of seventy or eighty years, and not the young and vigorous forty or so that Hissune knew him to be.

  There was an endless moment of tense silence. At length Lord Valentine said, speaking slowly and deliberately and addressing his words to Hissune as though no one else were in the room, “Let me hear no more talk of war while hope of peace remains. But the omens were dark, true enough: if there is not to be war, there is certain to be some calamity of another kind. I will not ignore such warnings. We have changed some of our plans this night, Hissune.”

  “Will you call off the grand processional, my lord?”

  “That I must not do. Again and again I’ve postponed it, saying that there was too much work for me at Castle Mount, that I had no time to go jaunting about the world. Perhaps I’ve postponed it too long. The processional should be made every seven or eight years.”

  “And has it been longer than that, sir?”

  “Almost ten. Nor did I complete the tour, that other time, for at Til-omon, you know, there was that small interruption, when someone else relieved me for a while of my tasks, without my knowledge.” The Coronal stared past Hissune into an infinitely remote distance. He seemed for a moment to be peering into the misty gulfs of time: thinking, perhaps, of the bizarre usurpation that had been worked upon him by the Barjazid, and of the months or years that he had roamed Majipoor bereft of his mind and of his might Lord Valentine shook his head. “No, the grand processional must be made. Must be extended, in fact. I had thought to travel only through Alhanroel, but I think we will need to visit both continents. The people of Zimroel also must see that there is a Coronal. And if Sleet is right that the Metamorphs are the ones we must fear, why, then Zimroel is the place we must go, for that is where the Metamorphs dwell.”