Lord Valentine's Castle Read online

  Shanamir, who had been roaming the town during the days of Valentine’s training, reported that preparations for the great parade were well advanced. “Ribbons and streamers and flags everywhere,” he said, standing at a wary distance as Valentine began a morning warm-up with the three clubs. “And the starburst banner—they’ve lined the route with it, from Falkynkip Gate to Dragon Gate, and out Dragon and all along the waterfront, is what I hear, miles and miles of decoration, even cloth of gold, and green paint in the roadway. They say the cost runs to thousands of royals.”

  “Who pays?” Valentine asked.

  “Why, the people of Pidruid,” said Shanamir in surprise. “Who else? Those of Ni-moya? Those of Velathys?”

  “Let the Coronal himself pay for his festival, I’d say.”

  “And whose money would that be, except the taxes of the whole world! Why should cities in Alhanroel pay for festivals in Zimroel? Besides, it’s an honor to host the Coronal! Pidruid pays gladly. Tell me: how do you manage to throw a club and catch one at the same time with the same hand, Valentine?”

  “Throw comes first, my friend. By only a little. Watch very carefully.”

  “I am watching. I still can’t figure it out.”

  “When we have time, after the parade’s done with, I’ll show you how it works.”

  “Where are we going after here?”

  “I don’t know. Eastward, Carabella told me. We’ll go wherever there’s a fair or a carnival or a festival that will hire jugglers.”

  “Will I become a juggler too, Valentine?”

  “If you want to. I thought you wanted to go to sea.”

  “I just want to travel,” said Shanamir. “It doesn’t have to be by sea. So long as I don’t have to go back to Falkynkip. Eighteen hours a day in the stables, currying mounts—oh, no, not for me, not anymore! Do you know, the night I left home I dreamed I had learned how to fly. It was a dream from the Lady, Valentine, I knew it at once, and the flying meant I would go where I hoped to go. When you told Zalzan Kavol he had to take me along if he wanted you, I trembled. I thought I was going to—going to—I felt all—” He caught himself. “Valentine, I want to be a juggler as good as you are.”

  “I’m not very good. I’m only a beginner.” But, growing bold, Valentine threw the clubs in lower, faster arcs, showing off.

  “I can’t believe you just learned how on Twoday.”

  “Sleet and Carabella are good instructors.”

  “I never saw anyone learn anything so fast, though,” Shanamir said. “You must have an extraordinary mind. I’ll bet you were someone important before you became a wanderer, yes. You seem so cheerful, so—simple, and yet—and yet—”

  “Hidden depths,” Valentine said amiably, trying to throw a club from behind his back and hurling it with an agonizing crack against his left elbow. All three clubs splattered to the wet ground, and he winced and rubbed the bruise. “A master juggler,” he said. “You see? Ordinarily it takes weeks of training to learn to hit your elbow like that!”

  “You did it to change the subject,” Shanamir said, sounding more than half serious.

  8

  Starday morning, parade day, the Coronal’s day, the first day of the grand festival of Pidruid, and Valentine lay curled in sleep, dreaming a quiet dream of lush green hills and limpid pools flecked with blue and yellow pond-anemones, when fingers poking in his ribs awakened him. He sat up, blinking and mumbling. Darkness: long before dawn. Carabella crouching over him: he sensed the catlike grace of her, heard her light laughter, picked up the creamy fragrance of her skin.

  “Why so early?” he asked.

  “To get a good place when the Coronal goes by. Hurry! Everyone’s up already.”

  He scrambled to his feet. His wrists were a little sore from juggling with the clubs, and he held out his arms, letting his hands loll and flop. Carabella grinned and took them in hers and looked up at him.

  “You’ll juggle magnificently today,” she said softly.

  “I hope so.”

  “There’s no doubt of it, Valentine. Whatever you set out to do, you’ll do supremely well. That’s the sort of person you are.”

  “You know what sort of person I am?”

  “Of course I do. Better than you know, I suspect. Valentine, can you tell the difference between sleeping and waking?”

  He frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

  “There are times when I think it’s all the same to you, that you’re living a dream or dreaming a life. Actually I didn’t think that—Sleet did. You fascinate him, and Sleet doesn’t fascinate easily. He’s been everywhere, he’s seen much, he’s seen through everything, and yet he talks constantly of you—he tries to comprehend you, to see into your mind.”

  “I didn’t realize I was so interesting. I find myself boring.”

  “Others don’t.” Her eyes were sparkling. “Come, now. Dress, eat, off to the parade. In the morning we watch the Coronal go by, in the afternoon we perform, and at night—at night—”

  “Yes? At night?”

  “At night we hold festival!” she cried, and sprang away from him and out the door.

  In the morning mist the troupe of jugglers headed for the place that Zalzan Kavol had secured for them along the grand processional highway. The Coronal’s route began in the Golden Plaza, where he was lodged; from there he would move eastward along a curving boulevard that led out one of the city’s secondary gates, and around to the great road on which Valentine and Shanamir had entered Pidruid, the one bordered by twin columns of fireshower palms in bloom, and thence via Falkynkip Gate back into the city, and across it down Water Road through the Arch of Dreams and out Dragon Gate to the waterfront, to the edge of the bay, where a reviewing stand had been erected in Pidruid’s chief stadium. So the parade was double in nature: first a progress of the Coronal past the people, and then the people past the Coronal. It was an event that would last all through the day and into the night beyond, and probably toward Sunday’s dawn.

  Because the jugglers were part of the royal entertainment, it was necessary for them to take up a position somewhere near the waterfront end of things; otherwise they would never be able to cross the congested city in time to reach the stadium for their own performance. Zalzan Kavol had obtained a choice location for them close by the Arch of Dreams, but it meant that they would spend the better part of the day waiting for the parade to come to them. No help for it. On foot they cut diagonally through the back streets, emerging at last at the lower end of Water Road. As Shanamir had reported, the city was lavishly decorated, cluttered with ornament, banners and bunting dangling from every building, every lightglobe. The roadbed itself had been freshly painted in the Coronal’s colors, gleaming bright green bordered by golden stripes.

  At this early hour the route was already lined with viewers, and no open spaces, but a space in the crowd swiftly was made when the Skandar jugglers appeared and Zalzan Kavol produced his sheaf of tickets. People on Majipoor normally tended to courtesy and graceful accommodation. Besides, there were few who cared to argue points of precedence with six surly Skandars.

  And then the waiting. The morning was warm and swiftly growing hot, and there was nothing for Valentine to do but stand and wait, staring at the empty highway, at the ornate black polished stonework of the Arch of Dreams, Carabella jammed up against his left side, Shanamir pushed close on the right. Time ticked infinitely slowly that morning. The wells of conversation quickly ran dry. One moment of diversion came when Valentine picked a startling phrase out of the murmur of conversation from the rows behind him:

  “—can’t see what all this cheering’s about. I don’t trust him one bit.”

  Valentine listened more carefully. A pair of spectators—Ghayrogs, by the slippery sound of their voices—were talking about the new Coronal, and not in any complimentary way.

  “—issuing too many decrees, if you ask me. Regulating this, regulating that, getting his fingers in here and there. No need for it!”
>
  “He wants to show that he’s on the job,” the other said mildly.

  “No need! No need! Things went along well enough under Lord Voriax, and Lord Malibor before him, without all these fussy rules. Smacks of insecurity, if you ask me.”

  “Quiet! Today of all days, this is no way to talk.”

  “If you ask me, the boy’s not sure he’s really Coronal yet, so he makes sure we all take notice of him. If you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.” In worried tones.

  “And another thing. These imperial proctors all over the place, suddenly. What’s he doing? Setting up his own worldwide police? Spying for the Coronal, are they? What for? What’s he up to?”

  “If he’s up to anything, you’ll be the first one pulled in. Will you be quiet?”

  “I mean no harm,” the first Ghayrog said. “Look, I carry the starburst banner like everyone else! Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!”

  Interesting, Valentine thought. For all this frantic cheering and waving, the new Coronal was not universally loved and admired. How many of these others, he wondered, are merely pumping up their enthusiasm out of fear or self-interest?

  The Ghayrogs fell silent. Valentine scanned for other conversations, but heard nothing of interest. Again time crawled. He turned his attention to the Arch, and studied it until he had memorized its features, the carved images of ancient Powers of Majipoor, heroes of the murky past, generals in the early Metamorph Wars, Coronals who antedated even legendary Lord Stiamot, Pontifexes of antiquity, Ladies offering benign blessings. The Arch, said Shanamir, was the oldest surviving thing in Pidruid and the holiest, nine thousand years old, carved from blocks of black Velathyntu marble that were immune to the ravages of the weather. To pass beneath it was to ensure the protection of the Lady and a month of useful dreams.

  Rumors of the Coronal’s progress across Pidruid enlivened the morning. The Coronal, it was said, had left the Golden Plaza; had entered by way of Falkynkip Gate; had paused to bestow double handfuls of five-crown pieces in the sectors of the city inhabited primarily by Vroons and Hjorts; had stopped to comfort a wailing infant; had halted to pray at the shrine of his late brother Lord Voriax; had found the heat too great and was resting for some hours at midday; had done this, had done that, had done something else. The Coronal, the Coronal, the Coronal! All attention was on the Coronal this day. Valentine pondered what sort of life it must be, constantly making grand circuits of this sort, showing oneself in city after city on eternal parade, smiling, waving, throwing coins, taking part in unending gaudy spectacle, demonstrating in one’s physical person the embodiment of the power of the government, accepting all this homage, this noisy public excitement, and somehow still managing to hold the reins of the government. Or were there reins to hold? The system was so ancient it probably ran of its own accord. A Pontifex, old and by tradition reclusive, hidden in a mysterious Labyrinth somewhere in central Alhanroel, making the decrees by which the world was ruled, and his heir and adopted son the Coronal reigning as executive officer and prime minister from atop Castle Mount, except when he was engaged in ceremonial progresses such as this—and was either of them needed except as a symbol of majesty? This was a peaceful, sunny, playful world, so Valentine thought, though no doubt it had a dark side hidden somewhere, or else why would a King of Dreams have arisen to challenge the authority of the blessed Lady? These rulers, this constitutional pomp, this expense and tumult—no, Valentine thought, it had no meaning; it was a survival out of some distant era when perhaps it all had had necessity. What had meaning now? To live each day, to breathe sweet air, to eat and drink, to sleep soundly. The rest was foolishness.

  “The Coronal comes!” someone cried.

  So the cry had arisen, ten times in the past hour, and no Coronal had come. But now, just about noon, it seemed that in fact he was drawing near.

  The sound of cheering preceded him: a distant roar, like the crashing of the sea, that spread as a propagating wave along the line of march. As it grew louder, heralds on sprightly mounts appeared in the roadway, moving almost at a gallop, managing occasional trumpet blasts through lips that must be sore and weary after all this time. And then, mounted on a floater that carried them briskly along, several hundred of the Coronal’s personal bodyguard in the green-and-gold starburst uniform, a carefully selected group, both men and women, humans and others, the cream of Majipoor, standing at attention aboard their vehicle, looking, Valentine thought, very dignified and a trifle silly.

  And now the Coronal’s own chariot was in sight.

  It, too, was floater-mounted, hovering several feet above the pavement and moving quickly forward in a ghostly way. Lavishly bedecked with glittering fabric and thick white quarterings sewn from what might well have been the fur of rare beasts, it had an appropriate look of majesty and costliness. On it rode half a dozen of the high officials of the city of Pidruid and the surrounding province, all of them clad in robes of state, mayors and dukes and such, and among them, mounted on a raised platform of some silken scarlet wood, extending his arms benevolently to the onlookers on either side of the road, was Lord Valentine the Coronal, second most luminous of the Powers of Majipoor, and—since his adoptive imperial father the Pontifex was aloof and never to be seen by ordinary mortals—perhaps the truest embodiment of authority that could be beheld in this world.

  “Valentine!” the cry arose. “Valentine! Lord Valentine!”

  Valentine studied his royal namesake as intently as earlier he had examined the inscriptions on the ancient black Arch of Dreams. This Coronal was an imposing figure, a man of more than middle height, powerful-looking, with strong shoulders and long sturdy arms. His skin was of a rich olive hue, his hair black and cut to fall just below his ears, his dark beard a short stiff fringe at his chin.

  As the tumult of cheers descended on him, Lord Valentine turned graciously to one side and another, acknowledging, inclining his body slightly, offering his outstretched hands to the air. The floater drifted swiftly past the place where Valentine and the jugglers stood, and in that interval of proximity the Coronal turned toward them, so that for an electric moment Valentine and Lord Valentine had their eyes locked on one another. It seemed that a contact passed between them, a spark leaped the gap. The Coronal’s smile was brilliant, his bright dark eyes held a dazzling gleam, his robes of state themselves seemed to have life and power and purpose, and Valentine stood transfixed, caught by the sorcery of imperial might. For an instant he comprehended Shanamir’s awe, the awe of all these people at the presence among them of their prince. Lord Valentine was only a man, true—he needed to void his bladder and fill his gut, he slept at night and rose yawning in the morning like ordinary mortals, he had dirtied his diapers when a babe and would drool and doze when he was old, and yet, and yet, he moved in sacred circles, he dwelled on Castle Mount, he was the living son of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep and had been taken as son by the Pontifex Tyeveras, as had his brother, dead Voriax, before him, he had lived most of his life close to the founts of power, he had had given into his charge the government of all this colossal world and its teeming multitudes, and, thought Valentine, such an existence changes one, it sets one apart, it gives one an aura and a strangeness. And as the chariot of the Coronal floated by, Valentine perceived that aura and was humbled by it.

  Then the chariot was past and the moment was gone, and there was Lord Valentine retreating in the distance, still smiling, still extending his arms, still nodding graciously, still flashing his brilliant gaze at this citizen and that, but Valentine no longer felt himself in the presence of grace and might. Instead he felt vaguely soiled and cheated, and did not know why.

  “Come quickly,” Zalzan Kavol grunted. “We must ge
t ourselves to the stadium now.”

  That much was simple. Everyone in Pidruid except the bedridden and the imprisoned stood stationed along the line of parade. The auxiliary streets were empty. In fifteen minutes the jugglers were at the waterfront; in ten more they approached the huge bayside stadium. Here a crowd had already begun to form. Thousands jammed the wharfs just beyond the stadium to have a second glimpse of the Coronal as he arrived.

  The Skandars formed themselves into a wedge and cut brutally through this mob, Valentine and Sleet and Carabella and Shanamir following in their wake. Performers were instructed to report to the staging area at the stadium’s rear, a great open space fronting the water, and a kind of madness already prevailed there, with hundreds of costumed artists jostling for position. Here were giant gladiators of Kwill who made even the Skandars look frail, and teams of acrobats clambering impatiently over each other’s shoulders, and an entire nude corps de ballet, and three orchestras of strange out-worldly instruments, tuning up in bizarre discord, and animal-trainers tugging strings that controlled floater-borne beasts of improbable size and ferocity, and freaks of every description—a man who weighed a thousand pounds, a woman eleven feet high and slender as a black bamboo rod, a Vroon with two heads, Liimen who were triplets and joined by a rope of ghastly blue-gray flesh from waist to waist to waist, someone whose face was like a hatchet and whose lower body was like a wheel—and so much more that Valentine was dizzied by the sights and sounds and smells of this congregation of the bewildering.

  Frantic clerks wearing municipal sashes were trying to arrange these performers into an orderly procession. Some sort of order of march actually existed; Zalzan Kavol barked an identification at a clerk and received in return a number that marked his troupe’s place in line. But then it was their task to find their neighbors in the line, and that was not so easy, for everyone in the staging area was in constant motion and finding numbers was like trying to attach name-tags to waves in the sea.