“What do you mean?”
“If they object to having a commoner for the Coronal’s consort,” said Valentine, “how will they feel when they have a commoner for their Coronal?”
Carabella looked at him in bewilderment. “I understand none of this, Valentine.”
“You will. In time, you’ll understand all. I mean to work such changes in the world—oh, love, when they write the history of my reign, if Majipoor survives long enough for that history to be written, they’ll need more than one volume for it, I promise you! I will do such things—such earthshaking things—” He laughed. “What do you think, Carabella? Listen to me ranting! The good Lord Valentine of the gentle soul turns the world upside down! Can he do it? Can he actually bring it off?”
“My lord, you mystify me. You speak in riddles.”
“Perhaps so.”
“You give me no clue to the answer.”
He said, after a moment’s pause, “The answer to the riddle, Carabella, is Hissune.”
“Hissune? Your little Labyrinth urchin?”
“An urchin no longer. A weapon, now, which I have hurled toward the Castle.”
She sighed. “Riddles and still more riddles!”
“It’s a royal privilege to speak in mysteries.” Valentine winked and pulled her toward him, and brushed his lips lightly against hers. “Allow me this little indulgence. And—”
The floater came suddenly to a halt.
“Hoy, look! We’ve arrived!” he cried. “There’s Nascimonte! And—by the Lady, I think he’s got half his province out here to greet us!”
The caravan had pulled up in a broad meadow of short dense grass so dazzlingly green it seemed some other color altogether, some unworldly hue from the far end of the spectrum. Under the brilliant midday sun a great celebration was already in progress that might have stretched for miles, tens of thousands of people holding carnival as far as the eye could see. To the booming sound of cannons and the shrill jangling melodies of sistirons and double-chorded galistanes, volley after volley of day-fireworks rose overhead, sketching stunning hard-edged patterns in black and violet against the clear bright sky. Stilt walkers twenty feet tall, wearing huge clown-masks with swollen red foreheads and gigantic noses, frolicked through the crowd. Great posts had been erected from which starburst banners rippled joyously in the light summer breeze; half a dozen orchestras at once, on half a dozen different bandstands, burst loose with anthems and marches and chorales; and a veritable army of jugglers had been assembled, probably anyone in six hundred leagues who had the slightest skill, so that the air was thick with clubs and knives and hatchets and blazing torches and gaily colored balls and a hundred other sorts of objects, flying back and forth in tribute to Lord Valentine’s beloved pastime. After the gloom and murk of the Labyrinth, this was the most splendid imaginable recommencement of the grand processional: frantic, overwhelming, a trifle ridiculous, altogether delightful.
In the midst of it all, waiting calmly near the place where the caravan of floaters had come to rest, was a tall, gaunt man of late middle years, whose eyes were bright with a strange intensity and whose hard-featured face was set in the most benevolent of smiles. This was Nascimonte, landowner turned bandit turned landowner again, once self-styled Duke of Vornek Crag and Overlord of the Western Marches, now by proclamation of Lord Valentine more properly ennobled with the title of Duke of Ebersinul.
“Oh, will you look!” Carabella cried, struggling to get the words out through her laughter. “He’s Wearing his bandit costume for us!”
Valentine nodded, grinning.
When first he had encountered Nascimonte, in the forlorn nameless ruins of some Metamorph city in the desert southwest of the Labyrinth, the highwayman duke was decked out in a bizarre jacket and leggings fashioned from the thick red fur of some ratty little desert creature, and a preposterous yellow fur cap. That was when, bankrupted and driven from his estates by the callous destructiveness of the followers of the false Lord Valentine as they passed through this region while the usurper was making his grand processional, Nascimonte had taken up the practice of robbing wayfarers in the desert. Now his lands were his own again, and he could dress, if he chose, in silks and velvets, and array himself with amulets and feather-masks and eye-jewels, but there he was in the same scruffy absurd garb he had favored during his time of exile. Nascimonte had always been a man of great style: and, Valentine thought, such a nostalgic choice of raiment on such a day as this was nothing if not a show of style.
It was years since last Valentine and Nascimonte had met. Unlike most of those who had fought beside Valentine in the final days of the war of restoration, Nascimonte had not cared to accept an appointment to the Coronal’s councils on Castle Mount, but had wanted only to return to his ancestral land in the foothills of Mount Ebersinul, just above Lake Ivory. Which had been difficult to achieve, since title to the land had passed legitimately to others since Nascimonte’s illegitimate losing of it; but the government of Lord Valentine had devoted much time in the early years of the restoration to such puzzles, and eventually Nascimonte had regained all that had been his.
Valentine wanted nothing more than to rush from his floater and embrace his old comrade-at-arms. But of course protocol forbade that: he could not simply plunge into this wild crowd as though he were just an ordinary free citizen.
Instead he had to wait while the ponderous ceremony of the arraying of the Coronal’s guard took place: the great burly shaggy Skandar, Zalzan Kavol, who was the chief of his guards, shouting and waving his four arms officiously about, and the men and women in their impressive green-and-gold uniforms emerging from their floaters and forming a living enfilade to hold back the gaping populace, and the royal musicians setting up the royal anthem, and much more like that, until at last Sleet and Tunigorn came to the royal floater and opened its royal doors to allow the Coronal and his consort to step forth into the golden warmth of the day.
And then at last, to walk between the double rows of guards with Carabella on his arm to a point halfway toward Nascimonte, and there to wait while the Duke advanced, and bowed and made the starburst gesture, and most solemnly bowed again to Carabella—
And Valentine laughed and came forward and took the gaunt old bandit into his arms, and held him tight, and then they marched together through the parting crowd toward the reviewing stand that surmounted the festival.
Now began a grand parade of the kind customary to a visit of the Coronal, with musicians and jugglers and acrobats and tandy-prancers and clowns and wild animals of the most terrifying aspect, which were not in fact wild at all, but carefully bred for tameness; and along with these performers came all the general citizenry, marching in a kind of glorious random way, crying out as they passed the stand, “Valentine! Valentine! Lord Valentine!”
And the Coronal smiled, and waved, and applauded, and otherwise did what a Coronal on processional must do, which is to radiate joy and cheer and a sense of the wholeness of the world. This he found now to be unexpectedly difficult work, for all the innate sunniness of his nature: the dark cloud that had passed across his soul in the Labyrinth still shadowed him with inexplicable despond. But his training prevailed, and he smiled, and waved, and applauded for hours.
The afternoon passed and the festive mood ebbed, for even in the presence of the Coronal how can people cheer and salute with the same intensity for hour after hour? After the rush of excitement came the part Valentine liked least, when he saw in the eyes of those about him that intense probing curiosity, and he was reminded that a king is a freak, a sacred monster, incomprehensible and even terrifying to those who know him only as a title, a crown, an ermine robe, a place in history. That part, too, had to be endured, until at last all the parade had gone by, and the din of merrymaking had given way to the quieter sound of a wearying crowd, and the bronze shadows lengthened, and the air grew cool.
“Shall we go now to my home, lordship?” Nascimonte asked.
“I think it
is time,” said Valentine.
Nascimonte’s manor-house proved to be a bizarre and wonderful structure that lay against an outcropping of pink granite like some vast featherless flying creature briefly halting to rest. In truth it was nothing more than a tent, but a tent of such size and strangeness as Valentine had never imagined. Some thirty or forty lofty poles upheld great outswooping wings of taut dark cloth that rose to startling steep peaks, then subsided almost to ground level, and went climbing again at sharp angles to form the chamber adjoining. It seemed as though the house could be disassembled in an hour and moved to some other hillside; and yet there was great strength and majesty to it, a paradoxical look of permanence and solidity within its airiness and lightness.
Inside, that look of permanence and solidity was manifest, for thick carpeting in the Milimorn style, dark green shot through with scarlet, had been woven to the underside of the roof canvas to give it a rich, vivid texture, and the heavy tentpoles were banded with glittering metal, and the flooring was of pale violet slate, cut thin and buffed to a keen polish. The furnishings were simple—divans, long massive tables, some old-fashioned armoires and chests, and not much else, but everything sturdy and in its way regal.
“Is this house anything like the one the usurper’s men torched?” Valentine asked, when he was alone with Nascimonte a short while after they had entered.
“In construction, identical in all respects, my lord. The original, you know, was designed by the first and greatest Nascimonte, six hundred years ago. When we rebuilt, we used the old plans, and altered nothing. I reclaimed some of the furnishings from the creditors and duplicated the others. The plantation too—everything is just as it was before they came and carried out their drunken wrecking. The dam has been rebuilt, the fields have been drained, the fruit trees replanted: five years of constant toil, and now at last the havoc of that awful week is undone. All of which I owe to you, my lord. You have made me whole again—you have made all the world whole again—”
“And so may it remain, I pray.”
“And so it shall, my lord.”
“Ah, do you think so, Nascimonte? Do you think we are out of our troubles yet?”
“My lord, what troubles?” Nascimonte lightly touched the Coronal’s arm, and led him to a broad porch from which there was a magnificent prospect of all his property. By the twilight glow and the soft radiance of drifting yellow glowfloats tethered in the trees, Valentine saw a long sweep of lawn leading down to elegantly maintained fields and gardens, and beyond it the serene crescent of Lake Ivory, on whose bright surface the many peaks and crags of Mount Ebersinul, dominating the scene, were indistinctly mirrored. There was the faint sound of distant music, the twanging of gardolans, perhaps, and some voices raised in the last gentle songs of the long festal afternoon. All was peace and prosperity out there. “When you look upon this, my lord, can you believe that trouble exists in the world?”
“I take your point, old friend. But there is more to the world than what we can see from your porch.”
“It is the most peaceful of worlds, my lord.”
“So it has been, for thousands of years. But how much longer will that long peace endure?”
Nascimonte stared, as though seeing Valentine for the first time that day.
“My lord?”
“Do I sound gloomy, Nascimonte?”
“I’ve never seen you so somber, my lord. I could almost believe that the trick has been played again, that a false Valentine has been substituted for the one I knew.”
With a thin smile Valentine said, “I am the true Valentine. But a very tired one, I think.”
“Come, I’ll show you to your chamber, and there will be dinner when you’re ready, a quiet one, only my family and a few guests from town, no more than twenty at the most, and thirty more of your people—”
“That sounds almost intimate, after the Labyrinth,” said Valentine lightly.
He followed Nascimonte through the dark and mysterious windings of the manor-house to a wing set apart on the high eastern arm of the cliff. Here, behind a formidable barricade of Skandar guards that included Zalzan Kavol himself, was the royal suite. Valentine, bidding his host farewell, entered and found Carabella alone within, stretched languidly in a sunken tub of delicate blue and gold Ni-moyan tile, her slender body dimly visible beneath a curious crackling haze at the surface of the water.
“This is astonishing!” she said. “You ought to come in with me, Valentine.”
“Most gladly I will, lady!”
He kicked off his boots, peeled away his doublet, tossed his tunic aside, and with a grateful sigh slipped into the tub beside her. The water was effervescent, almost electrical, and now that he was in it he saw a faint glow playing over its surface. Closing his eyes, he stretched back and put his head against the smooth tiled rim, and curled his arm around Carabella to draw her against him. Lightly he kissed her forehead, and then, as she turned toward him, the briefly exposed tip of one small round breast.
“What have they put in the water?” he asked.
“It comes from a natural spring. The chamberlain called it ‘radioactivity.’ ”
“I doubt that,” said Valentine. “Radioactivity is something else, something very powerful and dangerous. I’ve studied it, so I believe.”
“What is it like, if not like this?”
“I can’t say. The Divine be blessed, we have none of it on Majipoor, whatever it may be. But if we did, I think we’d not be taking baths in it. This must be some lively kind of mineral water.”
“Very likely,” Carabella said.
They bathed together in silence awhile. Valentine felt the vitality returning to his spirit. The tingling water? The comforting presence of Carabella close by, and the freedom at last from the press of courtiers and followers and admirers and petitioners and cheering citizens? Yes, and yes, those things could only help to bring him back from his brooding, and also his innate resilience must be manifesting itself at last, drawing him forth from that strange and un-Valentine-like darkness that had oppressed him since entering the Labyrinth. He smiled. Carabella lifted her lips to his; and his hands slipped down the sleekness of her lithe body, to her lean muscular midsection, to the strong supple muscles of her thighs.
“In the bath?” she asked dreamily.
“Why not? This water is magical.”
“Yes. Yes.”
She floated above him. Her legs straddled him; her eyes, half open, met his for a moment, then closed. Valentine caught her taut little buttocks and guided her against him. Was it ten years, he wondered, since that first night in Pidruid, in that moonlit glade, under the high gray-green bushes, after the festival for that other Lord Valentine? Hard to imagine: ten years. And the excitement of her had never waned for him. He locked his arms about her, and they moved in rhythms that had grown familiar but never routine, and he ceased to think of that first time or of all the times since, or of anything, indeed, but warmth and love and happiness.
Afterward, as they dressed for Nascimonte’s intimate dinner for fifty guests, she said, “Are you serious about making Hissune Coronal?”
“What?”
“I think that that surely was the meaning of what you were saying earlier—those riddles of yours, just as we arrived at the festival, do you recall?”
“I recall,” Valentine said.
“If you prefer not to discuss—”
“No. No. I see no reason to hide this matter from you any longer.”
“So you are serious!”
Valentine frowned. “I think he could be Coronal, yes. It’s a thought that first crossed my mind when he was just a dirty little boy hustling for crowns and royals in the Labyrinth.”
“But can an ordinary person become Coronal?”
“You, Carabella, who were a street-juggler, and are now consort to the Coronal, can ask that?”
“You fell in love with me and made a rash and unusual choice. Which has not been accepted, as you know, by everyon
e.”
“Only by a few foolish lordlings! You’re hailed by all the rest of the world as my true lady.”
“Perhaps. But in my case the consort is not the Coronal. And the common people will never accept one of their own as Coronal. To them the Coronal is royal, sacred, almost divine. So I felt, when I was down there among them, in my former life.”
“You are accepted. He will be accepted too.”
“It seems so arbitrary—picking a boy out of nowhere, raising him to such a height. Why not Sleet? Zalzan Kavol? Anyone at random?”
“Hissune has the capacity. That I know.”
“I am no judge of that. But the idea that that ragged little boy will wear the crown seems terribly strange to me, too strange even to be something out of a dream.”
“Does the Coronal always have to come from the same narrow clique on Castle Mount? That’s how it’s been; yes, for hundreds of years—thousands, perhaps. The Coronal always selected from one of the great families of the Mount: or even when he is not of one of those, and I could not just now tell you when we last went outside the Mount for the choice, he has been highborn, invariably, the son of princes and dukes. I think that was not how our system was originally designed, or else why are we forbidden to have hereditary monarchs? And now such vast problems are coming to the surface, Carabella, that we must turn away from the Mount for answers. We are too isolated up there. We understand less than nothing, I often think. The world is in peril: it’s time now for us to be reborn, to give the crown to someone truly from the outside world, someone not part of our little self-perpetuating aristocracy—someone with another perspective, who has seen the view from below—”
“He’s so young, though!”
“Time will take care of that,” said Valentine. “I know there are many who think I should already have become Pontifex, but I will go on disappointing them as long as I can. The boy must have his full training first. Nor will I pretend, as you know, any eagerness to hurry onward to the Labyrinth.”
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