Valentine Pontifex Read online

  “Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

  “Crashed into you, did I? Should have—looked where I was going—”

  “I saw you, but there was no time. You came running so fast—here, let me help you up—”

  “I’ll be fine, boy. Just need to—catch my breath—”

  Disdaining the young man’s help, he pulled himself up, dusted off his doublet—there was a great rip up one knee, and bloody skin was showing through—and straightened his cloak. His heart was still thumping frighteningly, and he felt wholly absurd. Divvis and Mirigant were coming up the stairs, now. Turning to the young man, Elidath began to frame an apology, but the strange expression on the other’s face halted him.

  “Is something wrong?” Elidath asked.

  “Do you happen to be Elidath of Morvole, sir?”

  “I do, yes.”

  The boy laughed. “So I thought, when I took a close look. Why, you’re the one I was looking for, then! They said I might find you in the Pinitor Court. I bring a message for you.”

  Mirigant and Divvis had entered the vestibule now. They came alongside Elidath, and from their look he knew he must be a frightful sight, flushed, sweating, half crazed from his lunatic run. He tried to make light of it, gesturing at the young man and saying, “It seems I ran down this messenger in my haste, and he’s bearing something for me. Who’s it from, boy?”

  “Lord Valentine, sir.”

  Elidath stared. “Is this a joke? The Coronal is on the grand processional, somewhere west of the Labyrinth.”

  “So he is. I was with him in the Labyrinth, and when he sent me to the Mount he asked me to find you as the first thing I did, and tell you—”

  “Well?”

  He looked uneasily at Divvis and Mirigant. “I believe the message is for you alone, my lord.”

  “These are the lords Mirigant and Divvis, of the Coronal’s own blood. You can speak in front of them.”

  “Very well, sir. Lord Valentine instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole—I should say, sir, that I am the Knight-Initiate Hissune, son of Elsinome—instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole that he has changed his plan, that he is extending the grand processional to the continent of Zimroel as well, and also will visit his mother the Lady of the Isle before he returns, and that therefore you are requested to serve as regent throughtout the full time of his absence. Which he estimates to be—”

  “The Divine spare me!” Elidath whispered hoarsely.

  “—a year or perhaps a year and a half beyond the time already planned,” said Hissune.

  THE SECOND SIGN of trouble that Etowan Elacca noticed was the drooping leaves on the niyk trees, five days after the falling of the purple rain.

  The purple rain itself was not the first sign of trouble. There was nothing uncommon about such a thing over on the eastern slope of the Dulorn Rift, where there were significant outcroppings of fluffy light skuvva-sand of a pale reddish-blue color. At certain seasons the wind from the north that was called the Chafer scoured the stuff free and hurled it high overhead, where it stained the clouds for days, and tinted the rainfall a fine lavender hue. It happened that the lands of Etowan Elacca were a thousand miles west of that district, on the other slope of the Rift entirely, just a short distance inland of Falkynkip; and winds laden with skuvva-sand were not known to blow that far west. But winds, Etowan Elacca knew, had a way of changing their courses, and perhaps the Chafer had chosen to visit a different side of the Rift this year. And in any event a purple rain was nothing to worry about: it merely left a fine coating of sand on everything, that was all, and the next normal rain washed it all away. No, the first sign of trouble was not the purple rain but the shriveling of the sensitivos in Etowan Elacca’s garden; and that happened two or three days before the rain.

  Which was puzzling, but not really extraordinary. It was no great task to make sensitivos shrivel. They were small golden-leaved psychosensitive plants with insignificant green flowers, native to the forests west of Mazadone, and any sort of psychic discordance within the range of their receptors—angry shouting, or the growling of forest beasts in combat, or even, so it was said, the mere proximity of someone who had committed a serious crime—was sufficient to make their leaflets fold together like praying hands and turn black. It was not a response that seemed to have any particular biological benefit, Etowan Elacca had often thought; but doubtless it was a mystery that would unfold itself upon close examination, and someday he meant to make that examination. Meanwhile he grew the sensitivos in his garden because he liked the cheerful yellow glint of their leaves. And, because Etowan Elacca’s domain was a place of order and concord, never once in the time he had been growing them had his sensitivos undergone a withering—until now. That was the puzzle. Who could have exchanged unkind words at the border of his garden? What snarling animals, in this province of bland domesticated creatures, might have put the equilibrium of his estate into disarray?

  Equilibrium was what Etowan Elacca prized above all else. He was a gentleman farmer, sixty years old, tall and straight-backed, with a full head of dazzling white hair. His father was the third son of the Duke of Massissa, and two of his brothers had served in succession as Mayor of Falkynkip, but government had never interested him: as soon as he came into his inheritance, he had purchased a lordly span of land in the placid rolling green countryside on the western rim of the Dulorn Rift, and there he had built a Majipoor in miniature, a little world, distinguished by its great beauty and its calm, level, harmonious spirit.

  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 prod
uced their brief, stupefying display of brillance. Here were pinninas and androdragmas, bubble-bush and rubber-moss, 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 Mazzadone 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 have 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?”

  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 shoul
der 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?”