Valentine Pontifex m-3

by Robert Silverberg

  Hissune nodded. “I used to hear of it sometimes when I lived in the Labyrinth. It’s always been a secret shadowy sort of thing, very vague, never taken too seriously so far as I ever knew. And strictly lower class, something to whisper about behind the backs of the gentry. Some of my friends knew a little about it, or maybe more than a little, though I was never mixed up in it. I remember mentioning it once to my mother long ago, and she told me it was dangerous nonsense and I should keep away from it, and I did. I think it got started among the Liimen, a long time ago, and has gradually been spreading across the bottom levels of society in an underground sort of way, and I suppose now is surfacing because of all the troubles that have begun.”

  “And what’s the main belief?” Stasilaine asked.

  “More or less as Elidath said: that the dragons will come ashore some day and take command of the government and end all misery and suffering.”

  “What misery and suffering?” Divvis said. “I know of no great misery and suffering anywhere in the world, unless you refer to the whining and muttering of the Shapeshifters, and they—”

  “You think everyone lives as we do on Castle Mount?” Hissune demanded.

  “I think no one is left in need, that all are provided for, that we are happy and prosperous, that—”

  “All this is true, Divvis. Nevertheless there are some who live in castles and some who sweep the dung of mounts from the highways. There are those who own great estates and those who beg for coins in the streets. There are—”

  “Spare me. I need no lectures from you on social injustice.”

  “Forgive me then for boring you,” Hissune snapped. “I thought you wanted to know why there were people who wait for water-kings to deliver them from hardship and pain.”

  “Water-kings?” Elidath said.

  “Sea dragons. So they are called by those who worship them.”

  “Very well,” said Stasilaine. “There’s famine in Zimroel, and a troublesome cult is spreading among the lower classes. You said there were two important new developments. Are those the two you meant?”

  Elidath shook his head. “Those are both parts of the same thing. The other important matter concerns Lord Valentine. I have heard from Tunigorn, who is greatly distressed. The Coronal, he says, has had some sort of revelation during his visit with his mother on the Isle, and has entered a mood of high elevation, a very strange mood indeed, in which he appears almost totally unpredictable.”

  “What sort of revelation?” Stasilaine asked. “Do you know?”

  “While in a trance guided by the Lady,” said Elidath, “he had a vision that showed him that the agricultural troubles in Zimroel indicate the displeasure of the Divine.”

  “Who could possibly think otherwise?” Stasilaine cried. “But what does that have to—”

  “According to Tunigorn, Valentine thinks now that the blights and the food shortages—which as we now know are much more serious than our own first reports made them seem—have a specifically supernatural origin—”

  Divvis, shaking his head slowly, let out his breath in a derisive snort.

  “—a specifically supernatural origin,” Elidath continued, “and are, in fact, a punishment imposed upon us by the Divine for our mistreatment of the Metamorphs down through the centuries.”

  “But this is nothing new,” said Stasilaine. “He’s been talking that way for years.”

  “Evidently it is something new,” Elidath replied. “Tunigorn says that since the day of the revelation, he’s been keeping mainly to himself, seeing only the Lady and Carabella, and sometimes Deliamber or the dream-speaker Tisana. Both Sleet and Tunigorn have had difficulty gaining access to him, and when they do it’s to discuss only the most routine matters. He seems inflamed, Tunigorn says, with some grandiose new idea, some really startling project, which he will not discuss with them.”

  “This does not sound like the Valentine I know,” said Stasilaine darkly. “Whatever else he may be, irrational he is not. It sounds almost as though some fever has come over him.”

  “Or that he’s been made a changeling again,” Divvis said.

  “What does Tunigorn fear?” Hissune asked.

  Elidath shrugged. “He doesn’t know. He thinks Valentine may be hatching some very bizarre idea indeed, one that he and Sleet would be likely to oppose. But he’s giving no clues.” Elidath went to the world globe, and tapped the bright red sphere that marked the Coronal’s whereabouts. “Valentine is still on the Isle, but he’ll sail shortly for the mainland. He’ll land in Piliplok, and he’s scheduled to head up the Zimr to Ni-moya and then keep going into the famine-stricken regions out west. But Tunigorn suspects that he’s changed his mind about that, that he’s obsessed with this notion that we’re suffering the vengeance of the Divine and might be planning some spiritual event, a fast, a pilgrimage, a restructuring of society in a direction away from purely secular values—”

  “What if he’s involved with this sea-dragon cult?” Stasilaine said.

  “I don’t know,” said Elidath. “It could be anything. I tell you only that Tunigorn seemed deeply troubled, and urged me to join the Coronal on the processional as quickly as I could, in the hope that I’ll be able to prevent him from doing something rash. I think I could succeed where others, even Tunigorn, would fail.”

  “What?” Divvis cried. “He’s thousands of miles from here! How can you possibly—”

  “I leave in two hours,” Elidath answered. “A relay of fast floaters will carry me westward through the Glayge Valley to Treymone, where I’ve requisitioned a cruiser to take me to Zimroel via the southern route and the Rodamaunt Archipelago. Tunigorn, meanwhile, will attempt to delay Valentine’s departure from the Isle as long as he can, and if he can get any cooperation from Admiral Asenhart he’ll see to it that the voyage from the Isle to Piliplok is a slow one. With any luck, I might reach Piliplok only a week or so after Valentine does, and perhaps it won’t be too late to bring him back to his senses.”

  “You’ll never make it in time,” said Divvis. “He’ll be halfway to Ni-moya before you can cross the Inner Sea.”

  “I must attempt it,” Elidath said. “I have no choice. If you knew how concerned Tunigorn is, how fearful that Valentine is about to commit himself to some mad and perilous course of action—”

  “And the government?” Stasilaine said softly. “What of that? You are the regent, Elidath. We have no Pontifex, you tell us that the Coronal has become some sort of visionary madman, and now you propose to leave the Castle leaderless?”

  “In the event that a regent is called away from the Castle,” said Elidath, “it’s within his powers to appoint a Council of Regency to deal with all business that would fall within the Coronal’s jurisdiction. This is what I intend.”

  “And the members of this council?” Divvis asked.

  “There will be three. You are one, Divvis. Stasilaine, you also. And you, Hissune.”

  Hissune, astounded, sat bolt upright. “I?”

  Elidath smiled. “I confess I couldn’t understand, at first, why Lord Valentine had chosen to advance someone of the Labyrinth, and such a young man at that, so quickly toward the center of power. But gradually his design has come clear to me, as this crisis has fallen upon us. We’ve lost touch, here on Castle Mount, with the realities of Majipoor. We’ve stayed up here on our mountaintop and mysteries have sprung up around us, without our knowing. I heard you say, Divvis, that you think everyone in the world is happy except perhaps the Metamorphs, and I confess I thought the same. And yet an entire religion, it seems, has taken root out there among the discontented, and we knew nothing of it, and now an army of hungry people marches toward Pidruid to worship strange gods.” He looked toward Hissune. “There are things you know, Hissune, that we need to learn. In the months of my absence, you’ll sit beside Divvis and Stasilaine in the place of judgment—and I believe you’ll offer valuable guidance. What do you say, Stasilaine?”

  “I think you’ve chosen wi
sely.”

  “And you, Divvis?”

  Divvis’s face was blazing with barely controlled fury.

  “What can I say? The power’s yours. You’ve made your appointment. I must abide by it, must I not?” He rose stiffly and held forth his hand to Hissune. “My congratulations, prince. You’ve done very well for yourself in a very short time.”

  Hissune met Divvis’s cold gaze evenly. “I look forward to serving in the council with you, my lord Divvis,” said Hissune with great formality. “Your wisdom will be an example for me.” And he took Divvis’s hand.

  Whatever reply Divvis intended to make seemed to choke in his throat. Slowly he withdrew his hand from Hissune’s grasp, glared, and stalked from the room.

  11

  The wind was out of the south, and hot and hard, the kind of wind that the dragon-hunting captains called “the Sending,” because it blew up from the barren continent of Suvrael where the King of Dreams had his lair. It was a wind that parched the soul and withered the heart, but Valentine paid no heed to it: his spirit was elsewhere, dreaming of the tasks that lay before him, and these days he stood for hours at a time on the royal deck of the Lady Thiin, looking to the horizon for the first sign of the mainland and giving no thought to the torrid, sharp-edged gusts that whistled about him.

  The voyage from the Isle to Zimroel was beginning to seem interminable. Asenhart had spoken of a sluggish sea and contrary winds, of the need to shorten sail and take a more southerly route, and other such problems. Valentine, who was no sailor, could not quarrel with these decisions, but he grew fiercely impatient as the days went by and the western continent grew no closer. More than once they were compelled to change course to avoid sea-dragon herds, for on this side of the Isle the waters were thick with them. Some of the Skandar crewmen claimed that this was the greatest migration in five thousand years. Whether or not that was true, certainly they were abundant, and terrifying: Valentine had seen nothing like this on his last crossing of these waters many years ago, in that ill-fated journey when the giant dragon stove in the hull of Captain Gorzval’s Brangalyn.

  Generally the dragons moved in groups of thirty to fifty, at several days’ distance from one another. But occasionally a single huge dragon, a veritable dragon-king, was seen swimming steadfastly by itself, moving unhurriedly, as though deep in weighty meditations. Then after a time no more dragons, great or small, were seen, and the wind strengthened, and the fleet made haste toward the port of Piliplok.

  And one morning came shouts from the top deck: “Piliplok ho! Piliplok!”

  The great seaport loomed up suddenly, dazzling and splendid in its forbidding, intense way, on its high promontory overlooking the southern shore of the mouth of the Zimr. Here, where the river was enormously wide and stained the sea dark for hundreds of miles with the silt it had swept from the heart of the continent, stood a city of eleven million people, rigidly laid out according to a complex and unyielding master design, spread out along with precise arcs intersected by the spokes of grand boulevards that radiated from the waterfront. It was, Valentine thought, a difficult city to love, for all the beauty of its broad welcoming harbor. Yet as he stood staring at it he caught sight of his Skandar companion Zalzan Kavol, who was native to Piliplok, gazing out upon it with a tender expression of wonder and delight on his harsh, dour face.

  “The dragon-ships are coming!” someone cried, when the Lady Thiin was somewhat nearer to the shore. “Look, there, it must be the whole fleet!”

  “Oh, Valentine, how lovely!” Carabella said softly, close beside him.

  Lovely indeed. Until this moment, Valentine had never thought that the vessels in which the seafarers of Piliplok went forth to hunt the dragons were beautiful in any way. They were sinister things, swollen of hull, grotesquely decorated with hideous figureheads and threatening spiky tails and gaudy, painted rows of white teeth and scarlet-and-yellow eyes along their flanks; and taken one by one they seemed merely barbaric, repellent. Yet somehow in a flotilla this huge—and it looked as though every dragon-ship in Piliplok was on its way out to sea to greet the arriving Coronal—they took on a bizarre kind of glory. Along the line of the horizon their sails, black striped with crimson, bellied out in the breeze like festive flags.

  When they drew near, they spread out about the royal fleet in what surely was a carefully planned formation, and hoisted great Coronal ensigns in green and gold into their riggings, and shouted raucously into the wind, “Valentine! Lord Valentine! Hail, Lord Valentine!” The music of drums and trumpets and sistirons and galistanes drifted across the water, blurred and muddled but nonetheless jubilant and touching.

  A very different reception, thought Valentine wryly, from the one he had had on his last visit to Piliplok, when he and Zalzan Kavol and the rest of the jugglers had gone pitifully from one dragon-captain to the next, trying in vain to hire one to carry them toward the Isle of Sleep, until finally they had managed to buy passage aboard the smallest and shabbiest and unluckiest vessel of all. But many things had altered since then.

  The grandest of the dragon-ships now approached the Lady Thiin, and put forth a boat bearing a Skandar and two humans. When they came alongside, a floater-basket was lowered to draw them up on deck, but the humans remained at their oars, and only the Skandar came aboard.

  She was old and weatherbeaten and tough-looking, with two of her powerful incisor teeth missing and fur of a dull grayish color. “I am Guidrag,” she said, and after a moment Valentine remembered her: the oldest and most revered of the dragon-captains, and one of those who had refused to take the jugglers on as passengers on her own ship; but she had refused in a kindly way, and had sent them on to Captain Gorzval and his Brangalyn. He wondered if she remembered him: very likely not. When one wears the Coronal’s robes, Valentine had long ago discovered, the man within the robes tends to become invisible.

  Guidrag made a rough but eloquent speech of welcome on behalf of all her shipmates and fellow dragon-hunters and presented Valentine with an elaborately carved necklace made from interlocking sea-dragon bones. Afterward he gave thanks for this grand naval display, and asked her why the dragon-ship fleet was idle here in Piliplok harbor and not out hunting on the high seas; to which she replied that this year’s migration had brought the dragons past the coast in such astonishing and unprecedented numbers that all the dragon-ships had fulfilled their lawful quotas in the first few weeks of the hunt; their season had ended almost as soon as it had begun.

  “This has been a strange year,” said Guidrag. “And I fear more strangeness awaits us, my lord.”

  The escort of dragon-ships stayed close by, all the way to port. The royal party came ashore at Malibor Pier, in the center of the harbor, where a welcoming party waited: the duke of the province with a vast retinue, the mayor of the city and an equally vast swarm of officials, and a delegation of dragon-captains from the ships that had accompanied the Coronal to shore. Valentine entered into the ceremonies and rituals of greetings like one who dreams that he is awake: he responded gravely and courteously and at all the right times, he conducted himself with serenity and poise, and yet it was as though he moved through a throng of phantoms.

  The highway from the harbor to the great hall of the city, where Valentine was to lodge, was lined with thick scarlet ropes to keep back the throngs, and guards were posted everywhere. Valentine, riding in an open-topped floater with Carabella at his side, thought that he had never heard such clamor, a constant incomprehensible roar of jubilant welcome so thunderous that it took his mind away, for the moment, from thoughts of crisis. But the respite lasted only a short while, for as soon as he was settled in his quarters he asked that the latest dispatches be brought him, and the news they contained was unrelievedly grim.

  The lusavender blight, he learned, had spread somehow into the quarantined unaffected provinces. The stajja harvest was going to be half normal this year. A pest called the wireworm, long thought eradicated, had entered the regions where thuyol, an importa
nt forage crop, was grown: ultimately that would threaten the supply of meat. A fungus that attacked grapes had caused widespread dropping of unripe fruit in the wine country of Khyntor and Ni-moya. All of Zimroel now was affected by some sort of agricultural disturbance, except only the area of the remote southwest around the tropical city of Narabal.

  Y-Uulisaan, when Valentine had showed him the reports, said gravely. “It will not be contained now. These are ecologically interlocking events: Zimroel’s food supply will be totally disrupted, my lord.”

  “There are eight billion people in Zimroel!”

  “Indeed. And when these blights spread to Alhanroel—?”

  Valentine felt a chill. “You think they will?”

  “Ah, my lord, I know they will! How many ships go back and forth between the continents each week? How many birds and even insects make the crossing? The Inner Sea is not that broad, and the Isle and the archipelagos make useful halfway houses.” With a strangely serene smile the agricultural expert said, “I tell you, my lord, this cannot be resisted, this cannot be defeated. There will be starvation. There will be plague. Majipoor will be devoured.”

  “No. Not so.”

  “If I could give you comforting words, I would. I have no comfort for you, Lord Valentine.”

  The Coronal stared intently into Y-Uulisaan’s strange eyes. “The Divine has brought this catastrophe upon us,” he said. “The Divine will take it from us.”

  “Perhaps. But not before there has been great damage. My lord, I ask permission to withdraw. May I study these papers an hour or so?”

  When Y-Uulisaan had gone, Valentine sat quietly for a time, thinking through one last time the thing that he was intending to do, and which now seemed more urgent than ever, in the face of these calamitous new reports. Then he summoned Sleet and Tunigorn and Deliamber.

  “I mean to change the route of the processional,” he said without preamble.

  They looked warily toward one another, as though they had been expecting for weeks some such sort of troublesome surprise.