Valentine Pontifex Read online

  He managed to sign two more documents during the time that they were entering the huge room, so splendidly paneled with strips of bannikop and semotan and other rare woods, and making their way toward him with a clatter of booted feet against the elaborately inlaid floor. He picked up a third, telling himself that it would be the last one he’d do this day. It was merely a single sheet, and somehow Elidath found himself idly scanning it as he signed: a patent of nobility, no less, raising some fortunate commoner to the rank of Initiate Knight of Castle Mount, in recognition of his high merit and greatly valued services and this and that—

  “What are you signing now?” Divvis asked, leaning across the desk and penciling at the paper in front of Elidath. He was a big, heavy-shouldered, dark-bearded man, who as he came into his middle years was taking on an eerie resemblance to his father, the former Coronal. “Is Valentine lowering taxes again? Or has he decided to make Carabella’s birthday a holiday?”

  Accustomed though he was to Divvis’s brand of wit, Elidath had no taste for it after a day of such dreary meaningless work. Sudden anger flared in him. “Do you mean the Lady Carabella?” he snapped.

  Divvis seemed startled. “Oh, are we so formal today, High Counsellor Elidath?”

  “If I happened to refer to your late father simply as Voriax, I can imagine what you—”

  “My father was Coronal,” said Divvis in a cold, tight voice, “and deserves the respect we give a departed king. Whereas the Lady Carabella is merely—”

  “The Lady Carabella, cousin, is the consort of your present king,” said Mirigant sharply, turning on Divvis with more anger than Elidath had ever seen that kindly man display. “And also, I remind you, she is the wife of your father’s brother. For two reasons, then—”

  “All right,” Elidath said wearily. “Enough of this foolishness. Are we going to run this afternoon?”

  Divvis laughed. “If you’re not too tired from all this Coronaling you’ve been doing.”

  “I’d like nothing better,” said Elidath, “to run down the Mount from here to Morvole; taking maybe five months of good easy striding to get there, and then to spend the next three years pruning my orchards and—ah! Yes, I’ll come running with you. Let me finish just this one last paper—”

  “The Lady Carabella’s birthday holiday,” said Divvis, smiling.

  “A patent of nobility,” Elidath said. “Which will, if you’ll keep quiet long enough, give us a new Knight-Initiate, a certain Hissune son of Elsinome, it says here, resident of the Pontifical Labyrinth, in recognition of his high merit and—”

  “Hissune son of Elsinome?” Divvis whooped. “Do you know who that is, Elidath?”

  “Why should I be expected to know any such thing?”

  “Think back to Valentine’s restoration ceremony, when he insisted on having all those unlikely people with us in the Confalume throne room—his jugglers and the Skandar sea-captain with the missing arm and the Hjort with orange whiskers and the rest. Do you remember a boy there too?”

  “Shanamir, you mean?”

  “No, an even younger boy! A small skinny boy, ten or eleven years old, with no respect for anybody, a boy with the eyes of a thief, who went around asking embarrassing questions, and wheedling people into letting him have their medals and decorations, and pinning them all over his tunic and staring at himself endlessly in mirrors? That boy’s name was Hissune!”

  “The little Labyrinth boy,” said Mirigant, “who made everyone promise to hire him as a guide if they ever came to the Labyrinth. I remember him, yes. A very clever rascal, I’d say.”

  “That rascal is now a Knight-Initiate,” Divvis said. “Or will be, if Elidath doesn’t tear up that sheet of paper that he’s staring at so blankly. You aren’t going to approve this, are you, Elidath?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “A Knight-Initiate who comes from the Labyrinth?”

  Elidath shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter to me if he was a Shapeshifter out of Ilirivoyne. I’m not here to overrule the Coronal’s decisions. If Valentine says Knight-Initiate, Knight-Initiate he is, whether he be rascal, fisherman, sausage peddler, Metamorph, dung sweeper—” Quickly he inscribed the date beside his signature. “There. Done! Now the boy’s as noble as you are, Divvis.”

  Divvis drew himself up pompously. “My father was the Coronal Lord Voriax. My grandfather was the High Counselor Damiandane. My great-grandfather was—”

  “Yes. We know all that. And I say, the boy is just as noble as you are now, Divvis. This paper says so. As some similar paper said for some ancestor of yours, I know not how long ago and certainly not why. Or do you think being noble is something innate, like Skandars having four arms and dark fur?”

  “Your temper is short today, Elidath.”

  “So it is. Therefore make allowances for me, and try not to be so tiresome.”

  “Forgive me, then,” said Divvis, not very contritely.

  Elidath stood and stretched and peered out the great curving window before the Coronal’s desk. It afforded a stupendous view into the open abyss of air that dropped away from the summit of Castle Mount on this side of the royal complex. Two mighty black raptors, wholly at home in these dizzying altitudes, flew in great arrogant arcs about one another out there, sunlight rebounding dazzlingly from the crest of glassy feathers on their golden heads, and Elidath, watching the easy unfettered movements of the huge birds, found himself envying their freedom to soar in those infinite spaces. He shook his head slowly. The day’s toil had left him groggy. Elidath of Morvole, High Counsellor and Regent—

  Six months this week, he thought, since Valentine had set out on the processional. It felt like years already. Was it like this to be Coronal? Such drudgery, such captivity? For a decade, now, he had lived with the possibility of becoming Coronal in his own right, for he was the clear and obvious next in line. That had been plain almost from the day Lord Voriax had been killed in the forest and the crown had so unexpectedly passed to his younger brother. If anything were to happen to Lord Valentine, Elidath knew, they would come to him with the starburst crown. Or if the Pontifex Tyeveras ever actually died and Valentine had to enter the Labyrinth, that too could make Elidath Coronal. Unless he was too old for the job by the time that occurred, for the Coronal must be a man of vigorous years, and Elidath was already past forty, and it looked as though Tyeveras would live forever.

  If it came to him, he would not, could not, consider refusing. Refusing was unimaginable. But each passing year he found himself praying more fervently for continued long life for the Pontifex Tyeveras and a long healthy reign for the Coronal Lord Valentine. And these months as regent had only deepened those feelings. When he was a boy and this had been Lord Malibor’s Castle, it had seemed the most wondrous thing in the world to him to be Coronal, and his envy had been keen when Voriax, eight years his senior, was chosen upon Lord Malibor’s death. Now he was not quite so sure how wondrous it might be. But he would not refuse, if the crown came to him. He remembered the old High Counsellor Damiandane, father to Voriax and Valentine, saying once that the best one to choose as Coronal was one who was qualified for the crown, but did not greatly want it. Well, then, Elidath told himself cheerlessly, perhaps I am a good choice. But maybe it will not come to that.

  “Shall we run?” he said with forced heartiness. “Five miles, and then some good golden wine?”

  “Indeed,” said Mirigant.

  As they made their way from the room, Divvis paused at the giant globe of bronze and silver, looming against the far wall, that bore the indicator of the Coronal’s travels. “Look,” he said putting his finger to the ruby sphere that glowed upon the surface of the globe like a rock-monkey’s bloodshot eye. “He’s well west of the Labyrinth already. What’s this river he’s sailing down? The Glayge, is it?”

  “The Trey, I think,” said Mirigant. “He’s bound for Treymone, I imagine.”

  Elidath nodded. He walked toward the globe and ran his hand lightly over its silken-smooth m
etal skin. “Yes. And Stoien from there, and then I suppose he’ll take ship across the Gulf to Perimor, and on up the coast as far as Alaisor.”

  He could not lift his hand from the globe. He caressed the curving continents as though Majipoor were a woman and her breasts were Alhanroel and Zimroel. How beautiful the world, how beautiful this depiction of it! It was only a half-globe, really, for there was no need of representing the far side of Majipoor, which was all ocean and scarcely even explored. But on its one vast hemisphere the three continents were displayed. Alhanroel with the great jagged spire of Castle Mount jutting out into the room, and many-forested Zimroel, and the desert wasteland that was Suvrael down below, and the blessed Lady’s Isle of Sleep in the Inner Sea between them. Many of the cities were marked in detail, the mountain ranges, the larger lakes and rivers. Some mechanism Elidath did not understand tracked the Coronal at all times, and the glowing red sphere moved as the Coronal moved, so there could never be doubt of his whereabouts. As though in a trance Elidath traced out with his fingers the route of the grand processional, Stoien, Perimor, Alaisor, Sintalmond, Daniup, down through the Kinslain Gap into Santhiskion, and back by a winding course through the foothills to Castle Mount—

  “You wish you were with him, don’t you?” Divvis asked.

  “Or that you were making the trip in his place, eh?” said Mirigant.

  Elidath whirled on the older man. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Flustered, Mirigant said, “It should be obvious.”

  “You accuse me, I think, of an unlawful ambition.”

  “Unlawful? Tyeveras has outlived his time by twenty years. He’s kept alive only by grace of some sort of magic—”

  “By the finest of medical care, you mean,” Elidath said.

  With a shrug Mirigant said, “It’s the same thing. In the natural order of things Tyeveras should long ago have been dead, and Valentine our Pontifex. And a new Coronal should be off undertaking his first grand processional.”

  “These are not decisions for us to make,” Elidath grumbled.

  Divvis said, “They are Valentine’s decisions, yes. And he will not make them.”

  “He will, at the proper time.”

  “When? Five more years? Ten? Forty?”

  “Would you coerce the Coronal, Divvis?”

  “I would advise the Coronal. It is our duty—yours, mine, Mirigant’s, Tunigorn’s, all of us who were in the government before the overthrow. We must tell him: it is time for him to move on to the Labyrinth.”

  “I think it is time for us to have our run,” said Elidath stiffly.

  “Listen to me, Elidath! Am I an innocent? My father was a Coronal; my grandfather held the post you hold now; I have spent all my life close to the heart of power. I understand things as well as most. We have no Pontifex. For eight or ten years we’ve merely had a thing more dead than alive, floating in that glass cage in the Labyrinth. Hornkast speaks to him, or pretends to, and receives decrees from him, or pretends to, but in effect there’s no Pontifex at all. How long can the government function that way? I think Valentine is trying to be Pontifex and Coronal both, which is impossible for any man to carry off, and so the whole structure is suffering, everything is paralyzed—”

  “Enough,” Mirigant said.

  “—and he will not move along to his proper office, because he’s young and hates the Labyrinth, and because he has come back from his exile with his new retinue of jugglers and herdboys, who are so captivated by the splendors of the Mount that they will not allow him to see that his true responsibility lies—”

  “Enough!”

  “One moment more,” said Divvis earnestly. “Are you blind, Elidath? Only eight years back we experienced something altogether unique in our history, when a lawful Coronal was overthrown without our knowing it, and an unanointed king put in his place. And what kind of man was that? A Metamorph puppet, Elidath! And the King of Dreams himself an actual Metamorph! Two of the four Powers of the Realm usurped, and this very Castle filled with Metamorph impostors—”

  “All of them discovered and destroyed. And the throne bravely regained by its rightful holder, Divvis.”

  “Indeed. Indeed. And do you think the Metamorphs have gone politely back to their jungles? I tell you, they are scheming right this instant to destroy Majipoor and take back for themselves whatever is left, which we have known since the moment of Valentine’s restoration, and what has he done about it? What has he done about it, Elidath? Stretched out his arms to them in love. Promised them that he will right ancient wrongs and remedy old injustices. Yes, and still they scheme against us!”

  “I will run without you,” said Elidath. “Stay here, sit at the Coronal’s desk, sign those mounds of decrees. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Divvis? To sit at that desk?” He swung about angrily and started from the room.

  “Wait,” Divvis said. “We’re coming.” He sprinted after Elidath, came up alongside him, caught him by the elbow. In a low intense tone quite different from his usual mocking drawl he declared, “I said nothing of the succession, except that it is necessary for Valentine to move on to the Pontificate. Do you think I would challenge you for the crown?”

  “I am not a candidate for the crown,” said Elidath.

  “No one is ever a candidate for the crown,” Divvis answered. “But even a child knows you are the heir presumptive. Elidath, Elidath—!”

  “Let him be,” said Mirigant. “We are here to run, I thought.”

  “Yes. Let us run, and no more of this talk for now,” said Divvis.

  “The Divine be praised,” Elidath muttered.

  He led the way down the flights of broad stone stairs, worn smooth by centuries of use, and out past the guardposts into Vildivar Close, the boulevard of pink granite blocks that linked the inner Castle, the Coronal’s primary working quarters, to the all but incomprehensible maze of outer buildings that surrounded it at the summit of the Mount. He felt as though a band of hot steel had been wrapped about his forehead. First to be signing a myriad foolish documents, then to have to listen to Divvis’s treasonous harangue—

  Yet he knew Divvis to be right. The world could not much longer continue this way. When great actions needed to be undertaken, Pontifex and Coronal must consult with one another, and let their shared wisdom check all folly. But there was no Pontifex, in any real sense. And Valentine, attempting to operate alone, was failing. Not even the greatest of Coronals, not Confalume, not Prestimion, not Dekkeret, had presumed to try to rule Majipoor alone. And the challenges they had faced were as nothing compared with the one confronting Valentine. Who could have imagined, in Lord Confalume’s day, that the humble subjugated Metamorphs would ever rise again to seek redress for the loss of their world? Yet that uprising was well under way in secret places. Elidath was not likely ever to forget the last hours of the war of restoration, when he had fought his way into the vaults where the machines that controlled the climate of Castle Mount were kept, and to save those machines had had to slay troops clad in the uniform of the Coronal’s own guard—who as they died changed form and became slit-mouthed, noseless, slope-eyed Shapeshifters. That was eight years ago: and Valentine still hoped to reach that nation of malcontents with his love, and find some honorable peaceful way of healing their anger. But after eight years there were no concrete achievements to show; and who knew what new infiltration the Metamorphs had effected by now?

  Elidath pulled breath deep into his lungs and broke into a furious pounding gallop, that left Mirigant and Divvis far behind within moments.

  “Hoy!” Divvis called. “Is that your idea of jogging?”

  He paid no attention. The pain within him could be burned away only by another kind of pain; and so he ran, in a frenzy, pushing himself to the limits of his strength. On, on, on, past the delicate five-peaked tower of Lord Arioc, past Lord Kinniken’s chapel, past the Pontifical-guest-house. Down the Guadeloom Cascade, and around the squat black mass of Lord Prankipin’s treasury, and up the
Ninety-Nine Steps, heart beginning to thunder in his breast, toward the vestibule of the Pinitor Court—on, on, through precincts he had traversed every day for thirty years, since as a child he had come here from Morvole at the foot of the Mount to be taught the arts of government. How many times he and Valentine had run like this, or Stasilaine or Tunigorn—they were close as brothers, the four of them, four wild boys roaring through Lord Malibor’s Castle, as it was known in those days—ah, how joyous life had been for them then! They had assumed they would be counsellors under Voriax when he became Coronal, as everyone knew would happen, but not for many years; and then Lord Malibor died much too early, and also Voriax who followed him, and to Valentine went the crown and nothing had ever been the same for any of them again.

  And now? It is time for Valentine to move on to the Labyrinth, Divvis had said. Yes. Yes. Somewhat young to be Pontifex, yes, but that was the hard luck of coming to the throne in Tyeveras’s dotage. The old emperor deserved the sleep of the grave, and Valentine must go to the Labyrinth, and the starburst crown must descend—

  To me? Lord Elidath? Is this to be Lord Elidath’s Castle?

  The thought filled him with awe and wonder: and also with fear. He had seen, these past six months, what it was to be Coronal.

  “Elidath! You’ll kill yourself! You’re running like a madman!” That was Mirigant’s voice, from far below, like something blown by the wind out of a distant city. Elidath was nearly at the top of the Ninety-Nine Steps now. There was a booming in his chest, and his vision was beginning to blur, but he forced himself onward, to the last of the steps, and into the narrow vestibule of dark green royal-stone that led to the administrative offices of the Pinitor Court. Blindly he careened around a corner, and felt a numbing impact and heard a heavy grunt; and then he fell and sprawled and lay breathing hard, more than half stunned.

  He sat up and opened his eyes and saw someone—a youngish man, slender, dark of complexion, with fine black hair elaborately decked out in some fancy new style—getting shakily to his feet and coming toward him.