Valentine Pontifex m-3 Read online

  He raised the usual crops of the district: niyk and glein, hingamorts, stajja. Stajja was his mainstay, for there was never any wavering of demand for the sweet, buoyant bread that was made from stajja tubers, and the farms of the Rift were hard pressed to produce enough to meet the needs of Dulorn and Falkynkip and Pidruid, with close on thirty million people among them, and millions more in the outlying towns. Slightly upslope from the stajja fields was the glein plantation, row after row of dense, dome-shaped bushes ten feet high, between whose blade-shaped silvery leaves nestled great clusters of the plump, delicious little blue fruits. Stajja and glein were everywhere grown side by side: it had been discovered long ago that the roots of glein bushes seeped a nitrogenous fluid into the soil, which, when washed downslope by the rains, spurred the growth of stajja tubers.

  Beyond the glein was the hingamort grove, where succulent, fungoid-looking yellow fingers, swollen with sugary juice, pushed up weirdly through the soil: light-seeking organs, they were, that carried energy to the plants buried far below. And all along the borders of the estate was Etowan Elacca’s glorious orchard of niyk trees, in groups of five laid out, as was the custom, in intricate geometrical patterns. He loved to walk among them and slide his hands lovingly over their slim black trunks, no thicker than a man’s arm and smoother than fine satin. A niyk tree lived only ten years: in the first three it grew with astonishing swiftness to its forty-foot height, in the fourth it bore for the first time its stunning cup-shaped golden flowers, blood-red at the center, and from then on it yielded an abundance of translucent, crescent-shaped, tart-flavored white fruits, until the moment of its death came suddenly upon it and within hours the graceful tree became a dried husk that a child could snap in half. The fruit, though poisonous when raw, was indispensable in the sharp, harsh stews and porridges favored in the Ghayrog cuisine. Only in the Rift did niyk grow really well, and Etowan Elacca enjoyed a steady market for his crop.

  Farming provided Etowan Elacca with a sense of usefulness; but it did not fully satisfy his love of beauty. For that he had created on his property a private botanical garden where he had assembled a wondrous ornamental display, taking from all parts of the world every fascinating plant that could thrive in the warm, moist climate of the Rift.

  Here were alabandinas both of Zimroel and Alhanroel, in all the natural colors and most of the hybrids as well. Here were tanigales and thwales, and nightflower trees from the Metamorph forests, that at midnight on Winterday alone produced their brief, stupefying display of brilliance. Here were pinninas and androdragmas, bubblebush and rubbermoss, halatingas grown from cuttings obtained on Castle Mount, and caramangs, muornas, sihornish vines, sefitongals, eldirons. He experimented also with such difficult things as fireshower palms from Pidruid, which sometimes lived six or seven seasons for him, but would never flower this far from the sea, and needle trees of the high country, which waned quickly without the chill they required, and the strange ghostly moon-cactus of the Velalisier Desert, which he tried in vain to shelter from the too-frequent rains. Nor did Etowan Elacca ignore the plants native to his own region of Zimroel, merely because they were less exotic: he grew the odd bloated bladdertrees that swayed, buoyant as balloons, on their swollen stems, and the sinister carnivorous mouthplants of the Mazadone forests, and singing ferns, cabbage trees, a couple of enormous dwikkas, half a dozen prehistoric-looking fern trees. By way of ground cover he used little clumps of sensitivos wherever it seemed appropriate, for their shy and delicate nature seemed a suitable contrast to the gaudier and more assertive plants that were the core of his collection.

  The day he discovered the withering of the sensitivos had begun in more than ordinary splendor. Last night there had been light rain; but the showers had moved on, Etowan Elacca perceived, as he set forth on his customary stroll through his garden at dawn, and the air was cloudless and unusually clear, so that the rising sun struck startling green fire from the shining granite hills to the west. The alabandina blossoms glistened; the mouthplants, awakening and hungry, restlessly clashed the blades and grinders that lay half-submerged in the deep cups at the hearts of their huge rosettes; tiny crimson-winged longbeaks fluttered like sparks of dazzling light through the branches of the androdragmas. But for all that he had an odd sense of foreboding—he had dreamed badly the night before, of scorpions and dhiims and other vermin burrowing in his fields—and it was almost without surprise that he came upon the poor sensitivos, charred and crumpled from some torment of the dark hours.

  For an hour before breakfast he worked alone, grimly ripping out the damaged plants. They were still alive below the injured branches, but there was no saving them, for the withered foliage would never regenerate, and if he were to cut it away the shock of the pruning would kill the lower parts. So he pulled them out by the dozens, shuddering to feel the plants writhing at his touch, and built a bonfire of them. Afterward he called his head gardener and his foremen together in the sensitivo grove and asked if anyone knew what had happened to upset the plants so. But no one had any idea.

  The incident left him gloomy all morning, but it was not Etowan Elacca’s nature to remain downcast for long, and by afternoon he had obtained a hundred packets of sensitivo seeds from the local nursery: he could not buy the plants themselves, of course, since they would never survive a transplanting. He spent the next day planting the seeds himself. In six or eight weeks there would be no sign of what had occurred. He regarded the event as no more than a minor mystery, which perhaps he would someday solve, more likely not; and he put the matter from his mind.

  A day or two later came another oddity: the purple rain. A strange event, but harmless. Everyone said the same thing: “Winds must be changing, to blow the skuvva this far west!” The stain lasted less than a day, and then another rainshower, of a more usual kind, rinsed everything clean. That event, too, Etowan Elacca put quickly from his mind.

  The niyk trees, though—

  He was supervising the plucking of the glein fruit, some days after the purple rain, when the senior foreman, a leathery-looking, unexcitable Ghayrog named Simoost, came to him in what was, for Simoost, amazing agitation—serpentine hair madly tangling, forked tongue flickering as though trying to escape from his mouth—and cried, “The niyk! The niyk!”

  The grayish-white leaves of niyk trees are pencil-shaped, and stand erect in sparse clumps at the ends of black two-inch stems, as though they had been turned upright by some sudden electric shock. Since the tree is so slender and its branches are so few and angular, this upturning of the leaves gives it a curious thorny look that makes a niyk tree unmistakable even at a great distance. Now, as Etowan Elacca ran with Simoost toward the grove, he saw while still hundreds of yards away that something had occurred that he would not have thought possible: every leaf on every niyk tree had turned downward, as though they were not niyks but some sort of weeping tanigale or halatinga!

  “Yesterday they were fine,” Simoost said. “This morning they were fine! But now—now—”

  Etowan Elacca reached the first group of five niyks and put his hand to the nearest trunk. It felt strangely light; he pushed and the tree gave way, dry roots ripping easily from the ground. He pushed a second, a third.

  “Dead,” he said.

  “The leaves—” said Simoost. “Even a dead niyk still keeps its leaves facing up. Yet these—I’ve never seen anything like this—”

  “Not a natural death,” Etowan Elacca murmured. “Something new, Simoost.”

  He ran from group to group, shoving the trees over; and by the third group he was no longer running, and by the fifth he was walking very slowly indeed, with his head bowed.

  “Dead—all dead—my beautiful niyks—”

  The whole grove was gone. They had died as niyks die, swiftly, all moisture fleeing their spongy stems; but an entire grove of niyks planted in staggered fashion over a ten-year cycle should not die all at once, and the strange behavior of the leaves was inexplicable.

  “We’ll hav
e to report this to the agricultural agent,” Etowan Elacca said. “And send messengers too, Simoost, to Hagidawn’s farm, and Nismayne’s, and what’s-his-name by the lake—find out if they’ve had trouble with their niyks too. Is it a plague, I wonder? But niyks have no diseases—a new plague, Simoost? Coming upon us like a sending of the King of Dreams?”

  “The purple rain, sir—”

  “A little colored sand? How could that harm anything? They have purple rain a dozen times a year on the other side of the Rift, and it doesn’t bother their crops. Oh, Simoost, my niyks, my niyks—!”

  “It was the purple rain,” said Simoost firmly. “That was not the rain of the eastern lands. It was something new, sir: it was poison rain, and it killed the niyks!”

  “And killed the sensitivos too, three days before it actually fell?”

  “They are very delicate, sir. Perhaps they felt the poison in the air, as the rain was coming toward us.”

  Etowan Elacca shrugged. Perhaps. Perhaps. And perhaps the Shapeshifters have been flying up from Piurifayne on broomsticks or magical flying machines in the night, and scattering some baleful enchantment on the land. Perhaps. In the world of perhaps anything at all was possible.

  “What good is speculating?” he asked bitterly. “We know nothing. Except that the sensitivos have died, and the niyk trees have died. What will be next, Simoost? What will be next?”

  12

  Carabella, who had been staring all day out of the window of the floater car as though she hoped somehow to speed the journey through this bleak wasteland by the force of her eyes, called out in sudden glee, “Look, Valentine! I think we’re actually coming out of the desert!”

  “Surely not yet,” he said. “Surely not for three or four more days. Or five, or six, or seven—”

  “Will you look?”

  He put down the packet of dispatches through which he had been leafing, and sat up and peered past her. Yes! By the Divine, it was green out there! And not the grayish green of twisted scruffy stubborn pathetic desert plants, but the rich, vibrant green of real Majipoori vegetation, throbbing with the energies of growth and fertility. So at last he was beyond the malign spell of the Labyrinth, now that the royal caravan was emerging from the parched tableland in which the subterranean capital was situated. Duke Nascimonte’s territory must be coming near—Lake Ivory, Mount Ebersinul, the fields of thuyol and milaile, the great manor-house of which Valentine had heard so much—

  Lightly he rested his hand on Carabella’s slender shoulder and drew his fingers along her back, digging gently into the firm bands of muscle in what was in part a massage, in part a caress. How good it was to have her with him again! She had joined him on the processional a week ago, at the Velalisier ruins, where together they had inspected the progress the archaeologists were making at uncovering the enormous stone city that the Metamorphs had abandoned fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Her arrival had done much to lift him from his bleak and cheerless mood.

  “Ah, lady, it was a lonely business without you in the Labyrinth,” he said softly.

  “I wish I could have been there. I know how you hate that place. And when they told me you’d been ill—oh, I felt such guilt and shame, knowing I was far away when you—when you—” Carabella shook her head. “I would have been with you, if it had been possible. You know that, Valentine.

  But I had promised the people in Stee that I would attend the dedication of their new museum, and—”

  “Yes. Of course. The consort of the Coronal has her own responsibilities.”

  “It seems so strange to me, still. ‘The consort of the Coronal’—! The little juggler girl from Til-omon, running around Castle Mount making speeches and dedicating museums—”

  “’The little juggler girl from Til-omon,’ still, after so many years, Carabella?”

  She shrugged and ran her hands through her fine, close-cropped dark hair. “My life has been only a chain of strange accidents, and how can I ever forget that? If I hadn’t been staying at that inn with Zalzan Kavol’s juggling troupe when you came wandering in—and if you hadn’t been robbed of your memory and dumped down in Pidruid with no more guile to you than a black-nosed blave—”

  “Or if you had been born in Lord Havilbove’s time, or on some other world—”

  “Don’t tease me, Valentine.”

  “Sorry, love.” He took her small cool hand between both of his. “But how long will you go on looking backward at what you once were? When will you let yourself truly accept the life you lead now?”

  “I think I never will truly accept it,” she said distantly.

  “Lady of my life, how can you say—”

  “You know why, Valentine.”

  He closed his eyes a moment. “I tell you again, Carabella, you are beloved on the Mount by every knight, every prince, every lord—you have their devotion, their admiration, their respect, their—”

  “I have Elidath’s, yes. And Tunigorn’s, and Stasilaine’s, and others of that kind. Those who truly love you love me also. But to many of the others I remain an upstart, a commoner, an intruder, an accident—a concubine—”

  “Which others?”

  “You know them, Valentine.”

  “Which others?”

  “Divvis,” she said, after some hesitation. “And the little lords and knights in Divvis’s faction. And others. The Duke of Halanx spoke mockingly of me to one of my own ladies-in-waiting—Halanx, Valentine, your native city! Prince Manganot of Banglecode. And there are more.” She turned to him, and he saw the anguish in her dark eyes. “Am I imagining these things? Am I hearing whispers where it’s only the rustling of the leaves? Oh, Valentine, sometimes I think that they’re right, that a Coronal should not have married a commoner. I’m not one of them. I never will be. My lord, I must be so much grief for you—”

  “You are joy to me, and nothing other than joy. Ask Sleet what my mood was like last week when I was in the Labyrinth, and how I’ve been since you joined me on this journey. Ask Shanamir—Tunigorn—anyone, anyone at all—”

  “I know, love. You looked so dark, so grim the day I arrived. I barely recognized you, with that frown, with those glowering eyes.”

  “A few days with you heals me of anything.”

  “And yet I think you are still not yourself entirely. Is it that you still have the Labyrinth too much with you? Or perhaps it’s the desert that’s depressing you. Or the ruins.”

  “No, I think not.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He studied the landscape beyond the floater window, noting its increasing greenness, the gradual encroachment of trees and grass as the terrain grew more hilly. That should have cheered him more than it did. But there was a weight on his soul that he could not shed.

  After a moment he said, “The dream, Carabella—that vision, that omen—there’s no way I can rid my mind of that. Ah, what a page I’ll have in history! The Coronal who lost his throne and became a juggler, and got back his throne, and afterward governed foolishly, and allowed the world to collapse into chaos and madness—ah, Carabella, Carabella, is that what I’m doing? After fourteen thousand years, am I to be the last Coronal? Will there be anyone even to write my history, do you think?”

  “You have never governed foolishly, Valentine.”

  “Am I not too gentle, too even-tempered, too eager to see both sides of an issue?”

  “Those are not faults.”

  “Sleet thinks they are. Sleet feels that my dread of warfare, of any sort of violence, leads me on the wrong path. He’s told me so in almost so many words.”

  “But there’ll be no warfare, my lord.”

  “That dream—”

  “I think you take that dream too literally.”

  “No,” he said. “Such talk gives me only idle comfort. Tisana and Deliamber agree with me that we stand on the brink of some great calamity, perhaps a war. And Sleet: he’s convinced of it. He’s made up his mind that it’s the Metamorphs who are about to
rise against us, the holy war that they’ve been planning, he says, for seven thousand years.”

  “Sleet is too bloodthirsty. And he has had an irrational fear of Shapeshifters since he was a young man. You know that.”

  “When we recaptured the Castle eight years ago and found it full of disguised Metamorphs, was that just a delusion?”

  “What they tried to do back then ultimately failed, did it not?”

  “And will they never try again?”

  “If your policies succeed, Valentine—”

  “My policies! What policies? I reach toward the Metamorphs and they slide beyond my grasp! You know that I hoped to have half a dozen Metamorph chieftains by my side when we toured Velalisier last week. So that they could observe how we’ve restored their sacred city, and see the treasures we’ve found, and perhaps take the holiest objects with them back to Piurifayne. But I had no response from them, not even a refusal, Carabella.”

  “You were aware that the Velalisier excavations might create complications. Perhaps they resent our even entering the place, let alone trying to put it back together. Isn’t there a legend that they plan to rebuild it themselves some day?”

  “Yes,” said Valentine somberly. “After they’ve regained control of Majipoor and driven us all from their world. So Ermanar once told me. All right: maybe inviting them to Velalisier was a mistake. But they’ve ignored all my other overtures, too. I write to their queen the Danipiur in Ilirivoyne, and if she replies at all, it’s in letters of three sentences, cold, formal, empty—” He drew in his breath deeply. “Enough of all this misery, Carabella! There’ll be no war. I’ll find a way to break through the hatred the Shapeshifters feel for us, and win them to my side. And as for the lords of the Mount who’ve been snubbing you, if indeed they have—I beg you, ignore them. Snub them back! What is a Divvis to you, or a Duke of Halanx? Fools, is all they are.” Valentine smiled. “I’ll soon give them worse things to worry about, love, than my consort’s pedigree!”